The ghost in this Bengaluru studio

This approach resonates with their collaborations too. When Padmaja Krishnan worked with the studio, she brought in textile traditions of weaving and dyeing, creating fabrics that envelop furniture with irregular textures and colours. Each test swatch became a part of the studio’s archive, ensuring that the tactile, iterative nature of textile craft was documented alongside carpentry. Knowledge, in other words, is always collective and cumulative, not a possession, and never of a single author.

The designer Klemens Grund, based in Switzerland, initially imagined the curves through the European method of steam bending. But building large steam rooms in Bengaluru was neither energy-feasible nor climatically necessary. Teak, moreover, is porous and resistant in ways that European hardwoods are not. What followed were months of experiments: soaking, strapping, bracing wood against bent metal, leaving it to “remember” the form. Each failure was archived, each success refined. The eventual solution was a process that respected the material, adapted Grund’s idea, and minimised waste. The Nandi day bed, inspired by the symmetrical sweep of a bull’s horns, embodies the studio’s ethic: no form arrives untouched; it is always negotiated between designer’s vision and maker’s knowledge.

By reissuing Chandigarh furniture, Phantom Hands acknowledges both the cosmopolitan and the local strands of this history. It also raises difficult questions: what does it mean to turn municipal furniture into collectible design? For Aparna and Deepak, the answer lies less in branding than in fidelity to craft. Joinery is refined, cane weaving remains hand-done, finishes are achieved without shortcuts. In this way, stewardship is not about static preservation but about making historical forms legible to the present.

Teak, Land, and the Politics of Material

If process is their moral vocabulary, material is their politics. “Indian teak is what we use primarily,” Deepak told me—a statement that opens onto a complicated reality. Phantom Hands sources both reclaimed and new timber, verifying each batch with origin certificates and long air-drying regimens. Yet teak itself is fraught: grown on government land, auctioned in bureaucratic systems, often entangled with histories of Adivasi dispossession and the informal economy of smuggling. Even with safeguards, the chain is porous. “Things can easily go amiss,” Deepak admits.

On the other end of the spectrum is Felix Pfäffli, the Swiss graphic designer whose collaboration with Phantom Hands injected playfulness into the catalogue. Pfäffli’s colourful, whimsical approach suggested that craft need not be solemn; it could be experimental, humorous, even irreverent. In a studio so invested in history and process, his work opened space for levity.

Then there are artistic collaborations that fold narrative into furniture. Nityan Unnikrishnan, for instance, painted whimsical figures and motifs onto Phantom Hands’ surfaces, creating pieces that act as both utilitarian objects and story-bearing canvases, where design carries narrative as well as function.

Rather than appear in a separate “collaborations” silo, these designers are woven through Phantom Hands’ practice. Each expands the studio’s vocabulary, showing how the workshop holds fidelity to tradition in one hand and a spirit of experiment in the other.

This infrastructure routinises care, turns tacit gestures into teachable data, and creates the conditions for skill transmission that needn’t remain proprietary. For Aparna and Deepak, the workshop is not only about producing furniture; it is about creating a system where knowledge can outlive any single collection.

What a Hand Remembers

Phantom Hands’ ethic is to remember—but not in a nostalgic sense. It is a remembering that asks difficult questions: of who owns design, how raw materials travel across contested geographies, and how craft knowledge should be stored, taught and shared.

The phantom is not a ghost of loss but a presence that insists: that knowledge lives in gestures, that authorship is always plural, and that making is also a form of thinking. In that sense, the future of design in India may depend less on singular visionaries than on the infrastructures we build to keep those phantom hands—and the very real ones they shadow—working together.