Project case study

Dadar Edit

Three handmade floorcoverings for Broadway Malyan's Mumbai studio. Kharad from Bhuj, Panja from Dausa, Bhadohi tufting from Uttar Pradesh, threaded into one reading of Mumbai.

By Rajeev Lunkad, Direct Create Projects Client broadway_malyan Location Mumbai, Maharashtra Start 2024-05 End 2024-08 Status completed Role advisory_and_oversight Published 2024-08-21

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.

Engagement history

The DCxBroadway conversation opened in May 2024 with the first proposal dated 24 May, followed by the 29 May iteration that set the three-carpet structure and the cultural framing. The detailed cost proposal followed on 5 June 2024. Through June the design moved into production specification, with the consolidated final artworks released on 21 June and the Panja colorways and Kharad final files locked on 24 June. Production photography began in July, with Kharad documentation on 8 July at the Tejsi workshop in Bhuj and Bhadohi video documentation on 16 July at the Raj Kumar workshop. The concept notes and social media cut were finalized in mid-August, and the Keynote master was delivered in January 2025.

Cultural translation methodology

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, never the loom to the narrative.

Production and collaboration

The collaboration ran across four cities 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, with payments structured in three tranches per carpet: 50 percent advance, 25 percent on pre-shipment review, 25 percent on delivery.

Lessons for the practice

Three lessons travel out of the Dadar Edit into the rest of the Direct Create archive. First, the Culture Stack methodology 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, never the office interior itself. Third, the Dadar Edit was one of the earliest Direct Create projects to use AI image generation as a design research tool. The AI Test runs folder in the project archive holds approximately 40 iterations of generative imagery used to explore mood, composition, and color before any artisan was approached. The AI served as a sketching instrument for the designer, not a substitute for the maker, and that distinction has carried into every subsequent project that uses generative tools at the research stage.

Published Substack

The cultural argument of the Dadar Edit became a Pillar 2 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.

Commercial notes

The engagement carried a hybrid fee structure. Product cost for the three carpets, excluding tax, ranged from Rs 1,89,000 at the lower specification to Rs 5,60,000 at the upper, with the Bhadohi piece as the largest single line at Rs 1,06,000 to Rs 3,89,000. Direct Create’s management fee was set at 100 percent of product cost, with GST at 12 percent on the total and transport billed at actuals. The two-month production window ran from design sign-off, and the collection was delivered in late summer 2024. The relationship sits in the archive as a model for commissioned cultural object work, distinct from the longer-arc advisory engagements at Central Vista and Mansagar.

Source documents

Required per CLAUDE.md Section 2.2 and consulted before any drafting per the research walk-up in Section 11. Each entry carries its absolute path and an ingestion status. INGESTED means the canonical facts from the source are reflected in this wiki body; PARTIAL means some facts are in, others remain; NOT YET INGESTED means the source is named here but its content has not been pulled into the wiki.

Image catalog

The Dadar Edit image archive was cataloged through the IIP pipeline on 19 May 2026, vision backend Claude Sonnet, profiles culture_stack and craft_commission. The catalog sits at dadar_edit/iip_output/catalog.json alongside this page and is referenced in the frontmatter as iip_taxonomy. 48 images carry full classifications across image_type, primary_subject, secondary elements, visual energy, orientation, dominant colors, lighting, mood, quality score, substrate value, cultural markers, and region.

The catalog distributes across eight image types: 12 methodology diagrams, 12 methodology slides, 8 product photographs, 5 process collages, 4 deck covers, 4 production specifications, 2 brand call-to-action slides, and 1 craft detail. The three crafts read across the catalog: 11 images touch the Kharad weave, 11 touch the Panja dhurrie, 8 touch the Bhadohi tufted carpet, and 16 touch the tufting work overall.

Four images carry the highest quality scores in the catalog and anchor any visual presentation of the project.

The image files themselves live in the project’s Dropbox archive named in image_archive above. Rendering them inline on the wiki page is deferred until the schema is revised to parameterize the archive root (see operations/known_issues.md, the absolute-path portability item). When that revision lands, this section will gain inline image references against the parameterized path.

This Image catalog section is the reference binding pattern for the wiki. Every project that has an IIP catalog should populate iip_taxonomy with the relative catalog path, surface the catalog distribution and the highest-quality images in a section like this one, and link the relevant craft pages to specific catalog items. The pattern is recorded as the integration benchmark in operations/quality_benchmarks.md.

Cross-references