Opening doors to creativity
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Craft outlets in the city offer a variety of state of the art doors and windows. PUSHPA CHARI
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CARVED TO ENTICE: Ethereal work on an old door. PHOTO: R. Ragu
Elaborately carved doors, unusual window frames and polished Chettinad pillars are fast becoming part of interior design vocabulary. Slatted dummy windows (early Raj period), Rajasthani `jharokhas' that frame paintings and mirrors or a beautifully sculpted `dasavatara' puja room door redefined as a wall hanging. Or even a haunting Anjolie Ela Menon painting that could be transferred as the panel of a door to create `living art door.'
Central Cottage Industries offer jharokhas in various sizes.
These magical windowscapes are largewith ethereal jaali work. The dark wood with its brilliantly sculpted animals, floral designs and human figures is a perfect frame for the mellow paintings. It also showcases jharokhas from stark rustic ones to elaborately sculpted and painted ones. Rajput miniature art finds a perfect setting in many of the jharokhas.
Kalpa Druma's newly opened GKS Handicrafts Centre has Rajasthani-style painted wood windows including attractive minakari work jharokhas with intertwined peacocks forming part of the framework.
The window frame is on display at Appa Rao Galleries' Accessory Shop (7 Wallace Gardens, off Nungambakkam High Road).
The window mirror has a four-panelled door featuring gilded figures of dhoti-clad pandits.
The twin doors open to reveal smaller niche doors, painted with gilded apsaras which again open to reveal a perfectly cast mirror.
In another exquisitely sculpted window piece, the twin doors open to reveal a mellow Thanjavur painting.
At Vrikshalaya's (19/9 Balaji Nagar, 1st Street Royapettah), a pair of colourfully-tiled Raj doors have been converted into a glass covered dinning table top.
The hand-made tiles are full of floral motifs. Yet another door from Karaikudi has one-and a-half ft panels carved with birds, floral motifs and beautiful peacocks.
For Rajasthani and rustic doors, one can place an order at Central Cottage Industries Emporium.
Vrikshalaya also has a few superbly polished Chettinad pillars on display.
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