Overview#
The Dadar Edit, subtitled Narrative Threads, is a collection of three handmade floorcoverings commissioned by Broadway Malyan for the firm’s Mumbai office at the Bandra Kurla Complex. Two are handwoven and the third is hand-tufted. The brief asked Direct Create to translate the cultural memory of Dadar into floor surfaces for a working architectural studio. The collection runs across three crafts and three geographies: Kharad weaving from Bhuj, Panja dhurrie from Dausa, and hand-tufted carpet from Bhadohi. Together the three pieces form a single narrative of Mumbai written in wool and cotton.
The project’s emotional thesis is Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City,” Mumbai’s spirit of creative energy and dense possibility, named in the practice’s source documents as the spirit the collection reaches for. Each carpet translates a different reading of that spirit into the grammar of a specific craft. The play on “Maxim Bay” in the second piece’s name is a deliberate echo of the frame.
The reading#
The teaching of the Dadar Edit sits in the chain of transformation from place to narrative to pattern to weave. The first link is Dadar’s four-century arc from fishing village to Portuguese settlement, from British trade quarter to the modern republic’s financial capital. The second link is narrative selection. Direct Create chose three readings of Dadar rather than one, because the city resists a single voice. Dadar Scape, the 18-foot by 10-foot Bhadohi tufted carpet, carries a bird’s-eye view of Mahim Bay with the Mithi River and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. Maxim Bay Mosaic, the 10-foot by 6-foot-6-inch Kharad oval, reads the same coastline from the bridge in mosaic form, with sky, water, and skyline stacked vertically. La Deco Mumbai, the 11-foot by 9-foot Panja dhurrie, abstracts the Art Deco legacy of early 20th-century Mumbai into geometric color. Each translation respects the grammar of its chosen craft: Kharad’s robust woolen flatweave for layered juxtaposition, Panja’s cotton precision for geometric clarity, Bhadohi’s tufted depth for cartographic detail. The narrative bends to the loom rather than the loom bending to the narrative.
Production and collaboration#
The collaboration ran across five locations and a single messaging thread. Saachi Mishra at Broadway Malyan held the client voice from Mumbai, Rajeev Lunkad held the design voice from Delhi, and three master artisans held the production hands in their respective workshops: Samarth Tejsi and the Tejsi family workshop at the Kharad loom in Bhuj, Shankar Lal Mali at the Panja loom in Dausa, and Raj Kumar at the tufting frame in Bhadohi. The Kharad piece was a family-led weave, with the Tejsi workshop carrying several pairs of related hands across the months of production; the rendering of any single weaver as a singular hero would misread what was in fact a workshop collaboration. WhatsApp carried the conversation across all five locations as a multimedia channel for sketches, color swatches, sample photographs, and production videos. The asynchronous, image-rich format proved well suited to artisan workflow, allowing a frame of work in progress to leave the loom in the morning and return with design feedback by evening. Direct Create held the producer role across all three commissions.
Lessons for the practice#
Three lessons travel out of the Dadar Edit into the rest of the Direct Create archive. First, Culture Stacking works at the scale of a single object as well as at the scale of a hotel, because the chain of place to material to craft to artisan can be compressed into one carpet without losing intellectual weight. Second, the advisory-implementation boundary holds even when Direct Create takes the producer role, because the practice produced the cultural narrative artifacts that sit within Broadway Malyan’s interior scheme rather than the office interior itself. Third, the Dadar Edit was one of the earliest Direct Create projects to use generative image tools as a design research instrument. Before any artisan was approached, mood, composition and color were explored in a set of research-stage sketches, three readings probed and set aside before the three-carpet structure locked: a Shivaji Park reading of cricket against high-rise apartments and the sea, a craft-grammar transfer test pairing Dadar’s urban landscape with Kharad compositional styles, and a form test for the oval that became Maxim Bay Mosaic. La Deco Mumbai used no generative imagery at all: its design was drawn directly from the Art Deco iron railings of Dadar’s Parsi Colony into Panja’s geometry, a pure design-and-craft translation. The sketch served the designer and never substituted for the maker, and that posture has carried into every subsequent project that uses generative tools at the research stage.
Published#
The cultural argument of the Dadar Edit became an essay on the Future of Tradition Substack, titled “The Dadar Edit: Weaving Mumbai’s Stories.” The essay extracts the cultural translation method from the project record and presents it as a stand-alone piece on craft, place, and narrative. It remains the canonical public articulation of the project.
A per-carpet publication series followed on the same hub, one essay, carousel, and reel for each carpet. Dadar Scape, the Bhadohi piece, published 13 June 2026 at https://rajeevlunkad.substack.com/p/dadar-scape. Maxim Bay Mosaic, the Kharad piece, published 16 June 2026 at https://rajeevlunkad.substack.com/p/maxim-bay-mosaic, reading the Mumbai bay from the Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Kharad’s geometry, with a making film scored to the track Woven in Amber. La Deco Mumbai, the Panja piece, published 17 June 2026 at https://rajeevlunkad.substack.com/p/la-deco-mumbai, completed the three-carpet series.