Piyo Chai Suno Kahani

Wood blocks to banquet tables  

The ongoing festival – Celebrating 100 Years of Art Deco: Mumbai and Miami Beach (with creative director Tinaz Nooshian so wonderfully executing fest founder Smiti Kanodia’s dream project Art Deco Alive) – brings to mind the lasting Kamdar legacy.

It all started in the 1930s. “Quit India”, the freedom stalwarts urged. And Bhagwandas Morarji Kamdar quit his job. The bright young civil engineer’s conscience stung, aware that the plum government post he enjoyed was British-controlled.

The 1930s heaved in political ferment, with Bombay the pulsing core of the Independence struggle. Bhagwandas got a personal jolt when his father’s second wife Ramaben, patriot and close ally of Kasturba Gandhi, was jailed. Fond of woodwork, which he had chosen as an ancillary course at Pune’s College of Engineering, he began moulding fine-finished Montessori blocks, waxed and hand-painted to distribute in schools. Until his Nepean Sea Road neighbour, Rameshwar Das Birla, asked to make him a dining table. Bhagwandas did, sawing away in his garage. That was his foray into furniture.          

Bhagwandas’ son Vikram Kamdar has engaging anecdotes to share in the Churchgate showroom the family has occupied since 1940. Located at Industrial Assurance Building, in the heart of a resplendent Art Deco haven, the Kamdar presence rose as if in spirited response to this vintage ambience. Across the road from Eros Cinema, the company hub is ringed by Deco-dressed residences. Sleek, confident, clean of line and curve, this genre of architecture and furniture – where striking geometrics and metallic finishes met dramatic accents and sweeping curves – first wowed the world at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs (therefore Art Deco) in 1925 Paris.

Moving from promise to prosperity, Bhagwandas founded Kamdar Karyalaya in 1934 at the Churchgate address. This workshop shifted to Kalachowki in six years. At the Churchgate premises Bhagwandas and his team advised clients on colour, lighting, composition and accessories. “I’m proud of the association Kamdar’s had with iconic Art Deco establishments like Markel lights from way back a century ago,” says Vikram.

In the absence of interior design schools then, Kamdar recruits had an applied arts background. Master craftsmen pooled their carpentry, upholstery, polishing and metalwork talents for furniture everyone aspired to. They outfitted hotspots like the Rendezvous at the Taj, the Napoli and Volga cafes, the Swissair reception office and James Finlay showroom.

Bhagwandas Kamdar steadily won customers across India, Europe and the Middle East. With trademark easy chairs, sofas, nursery suites, tapestries and carpets came innovations too. One being the popular “kamette”, a settee reclining flat at the touch of a light spring – used as an additional bed in homes or in offices by top brass grabbing a siesta in private cabins.

To meet mounting business volume, the artist Ernst Messerschmidt was invited to join the design department. The assignment bringing him to India by 1930 had been the Holkars’ Manik Bagh Palace in Indore. “Messer stayed in Bombay on losing his East Germany home,” Vikram explains. “He refined our entire studio culture. Watching him run the company with my father taught me manufacturing and production. I learnt about factory machinery, the timber trade, sawmill processes, wood seasoning and storing.”   

Vikram’s wife Nandini laughs, saying, “Before knowing Vikram, I grew up with four brothers whose rough ways my family’s Kamdar range withstood for years. Hearing our parents boast – that no iron could burn Messerschmidt’s imported upholstery – they decided to test that! Luckily it wasn’t a false claim. I later discovered Kamdar always honoured its tagline: ‘A tradition of trust’.”