Painted Forest, a collection of wallpapers by Tilla, inspired by the foliage at Wild Garden Cafe, Amethyst is also available for orders at Amethyst, Whites Road
About Tilla:
Tilla (n: hill) is a design studio based in Ahmedabad, India. Established in 2011 by clothing designer Aratrik Dev Varman, the brand celebrates handmade Indian textiles and craftsmanship, and is synonymous with contemporary luxury.
About Tilla Standard:
Tilla Standard is a collection of all-season cotton clothing that defines their style for everyday living. In keeping with our core values, the collection uses only natural fabrics and crafts such as batik and hand-weaving in conjunction with their staple graphic prints.
The pieces reflect a modern, working woman’s sensibility which means being practical and stylish at the same time. The collection looks at what luxury would mean in an everyday context — marrying good design with comfort and affordability — rather than only as rarified occasion-wear.
Designer’s Profile:
Aratrik Dev Varman is the founder and lead designer of Tilla (estd. 2011), a design studio and clothing label based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Originally from Agartala, Tripura, he is a textile design graduate from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. His work focuses on craft revival – repurposing vintage embroideries and recycling textile waste from his studio into large-scale artwork. The studio practises a multi-disciplinary approach to design, with recent projects including interiors and tableware.
About Painted Forest:
The Painted Forest collection of wallpapers draws from a lush, tropical landscape of plants such as palms and plantains, and trees such as the frangipani, kachnar and jackfruit. Arranged as a panorama, the main artwork features a garden in almost full scale, and spans over 90 feet as a non-repeating design. The artwork is entirely hand drawn and coloured using mixed media such as water colours, gouache and pencil.
Artist Jisha Unnikrishnan’s inspiration for the collection came from the garden at Amethyst, Chennai. Part real and part fantasy, and drawn in a naturalistic style, birds and animals disappear into the foliage set against a gentle monsoon sky, while a dense growth of shrubs and grasses form the base of the composition. The panorama serves as the inspiration for all the designs in this collection. References are varied and include the magnificent dreamscapes of Henri Rousseau, colours from Indian popular art, wood block printing and French Toile de Jouy textiles.
The collection brings in a connection to the outdoors and in particular, a wild, unmanicured landscape that feels almost utopic, a dream background that extends the everyday realities of living in our homes and offices into the endless beauty of nature.
Designers’ Profiles:
Aratrik Dev Varman is the founder and lead designer of Tilla (estd. 2011), a design studio and clothing label based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Originally from Agartala, Tripura, he is a textile design graduate from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. His work focuses on craft revival – repurposing vintage embroideries and recycling textile waste from his studio into large-scale artwork. The studio practises a multi-disciplinary approach to design, with recent projects including interiors and tableware.
Jisha Unnikrishnan is a designer and an illustrator at Tilla, Ahmedabad. After her post-graduation in textile design at NID, Ahmedabad in 2009, she worked on the documentation of the textile traditions of the North Eastern states of India on a research project with NID under the aegis of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi. Her other work includes craft documentation and illustrations for the book ‘Crafts of Uttarakhand’, a project by the Uttarakhand Handloom and Handicraft Development Council.