Cochin: Crafters, Filled to the Rafters

While construction is in final stages in the Chennai apartment, we escaped to find beautiful things. We set aside three days to shop for furnishings and accessories in Cochin. We decided to focus on the Crafters stores and not try to comparison shop everywhere. For ease and consolidation of purchases and shipping. Because we’ve become tired pretty quickly this trip. We now seek paths of least resistance.

We toured all the Crafters stores and warehouses. They’ve grown a lot since we visited a decade ago. Here are some sights seen there …

These are colorful and fantastical. Imagine if this place was like the movie Night at the Museum and these things came to life:

What if we kept foods today in containers such as these below. Jars in the first photo were used to hold pickles in India. Wouldn’t they mix well with containers from Greece, Tuscany or Provence.

Some of these are enormous. They’re all heavy. Why can’t practical objects also be sculptural and beautiful.

These are often repurposed with glass tops for coffee tables, or filled with upholstered cushions for low seating or ottomans:

Crafters has countless styles of old columns:

They have thousands of intricate old and new carved wood pieces, like this old window already outfitted with a mirror behind the shutters:

Hindu deities, Shiva and Parvathi:

Musicians:

A bride’s dowry chest from Punjab. If this is just the chest, can you imagine the treasures within!?

Rusted door locks and chippy paint can be beautiful:

In the next post, I will show the items we considered and purchased for the India pied-a-terre.

(By the way, all these photos were taken with the iPhone 4S with only minor edits in Photoshop. The camera is decent enough when you want the convenience of pulling out a small device to shoot pics.)

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