Tag Archives: Cochin

Cochin: The Ones That Got Away

Posted on December 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

You know the things you leave behind in shops, but they don’t leave your memory so quickly? These are those things. We left them behind in Cochin and I wish we hadn’t.

This piece represents my husband’s name (I should start calling him “P,” much shorter to type):

Reclining Buddhas. P needed to check with his mom regarding how big of a Buddha or Hindu deity you can keep in the house. Apparently it’s OK to keep larger Buddhas. We liked the soft coppery color of these reclining Buddhas:

Old copper water heaters. We thought one of these could be used to hold water instead of the ugly 15-gallon plastic jugs delivered to homes. We got the idea from November’s Elle Decor India magazine which featured a new hammered copper water heater. Very beautiful. These old ones are pricey and need a lot of restoration to be serviceable. We may seek a new one during a future trip. Right now they look like they should be sitting on the roof of an industrial manufacturing plant and not in a nice apartment. But with restoration they could be pretty:

I’ll do a separate post about our (thus far) futile search for the right unique pieces to fashion bathroom vanities. One idea was to find beautiful carved wood to attach under a wall-mounted granite counter. We found this carved wood piece and it was perfect. We were so excited. And at first the price was very good. Until they realized this was a nice old piece from a temple, and the price rose dramatically. Too much to cut up for a bathroom vanity. And besides the price, a piece this nice and old shouldn’t be cut up for that purpose anyway. So we still seek something like this:

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Living Room Furnishings Found in Chennai

Cochin: Furnishings Found

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Posted in Home Decor, Shopping, Travel in India

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Cochin: Crafters, Filled to the Rafters

Posted on December 7, 2011 by | 4 Comments

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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Cochin: The Ones That Got Away

Cochin: Furnishings Found

 Living Room Furnishings Found in Chennai

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Antiques in Kochi

Posted on April 3, 2011 by | 2 Comments

I am bursting with anticipation for our next trip to India, as we’ll revisit the antiques warehouses in Kochi that we first saw a decade ago. On our shopping list:

  • Small cabinets to repurpose as bathroom vanities
  • Old windows or other “frames” to use for bathroom mirrors
  • Lazy lounging chairs
  • Tables (side, coffee, possible dining)
  • A few old tall columns
  • Bookcases
  • Blue chippy painted wardrobe to achieve my guest room vision

We did not take any warehouse photos on our previous Kochi trip, but here’s photos from others who visited and shared their photos online …

Visit this link to see a photo very similar to the warehouse we visited from Flickr user eenar_6, a photo of an enormous urn and a photo of a “chair hospital.” There’s a place in Chennai with hundreds of chairs hanging like this. We’ll revisit there too, possibly for dining chairs.

Check this out from Flickr user thovie333 — piles and piles of stuff to wade through:

 

From Sri Lankan Airlines website:

From Wikimedia, Old Kochi:

From Virtual Tourist:

Most of the antique warehouses and shops are in Jew Town. Wandering through them is a real trip. Sometimes you see the most fantastic visual feasts, like this is a whole boat on display, photo via Travelpod:

From Metro Spiritual blog:

From Elizabeth in India blog:

From the away we go blog, more travelers to India:

These photos give you a sense of what it feels like to be there. Shopping success depends on not getting visually overwhelmed by all the stuff, and being able to zero in on a few special things. Survival of the visual fittest?

While in Kochi, we stayed at Bolgatty Palace.

Lovely place, quiet with beautiful gardens and expansive grounds to make you feel like you really got away. It’s on it’s own island and you take the boat jetty to get to it. However with all the time required to get to Old Town via the boat jetty, taxi, walking to Old Town ferry, taking the Old Town ferry … if you plan to spend most time in Old Town, it might be best to stay in Old Town.

We did not ship any purchases home from this trip. We purchased only what we could carry on the flight home. In Cochin, I got an urli with Lakshmi on one side and a gecko on the other side. Love it! But what I was really seeking was a lounging chair like this found at The Lockhart Collection:

And I found one, for US$100. We lived in Minneapolis at the time, and when the warehouse owner heard that, he mentioned a buyer for a shop in the Minneapolis area (which of course we were familiar with as it carried India goods) had visited the previous day, looking at the same chair. We did not purchase the chair immediately, but returned a few days later. By then, the Minneapolis shop had already purchased the chair. I found it on their website a few months later, of course at US retail price, and it was painful to see. We’ve had several businesses so we fully understand the need to cover costs and make a profit, absolutely no problem with that, it was just knowing it could have been mine for much less including the shipping. This time, I will get my lounging chair …

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