An art partner who works to your scheme rather than around it changes how the walls land — and, just as importantly, who owns the client relationship. This is a field guide to commissioning art for a project you're designing in India: how it works, what to brief, and where the control stays.
What an art partner does for a designer
For an interior designer, an art partner takes the artwork off your plate without taking it out of your hands. We work from your floor plans, palette, materials and intent — composing a set of works around a single project, commissioning what should be made new and sourcing what shouldn't, framing and sizing each piece to the architecture, and delivering to your programme. The art reads as part of your scheme, not an afterthought bought separately. And you decide the shape of the relationship: keep the client yourself and present the work as your own, or have us handle the art conversation directly. Either way, the designer stays in control of the room.
How The Edit works
The Edit is our commission programme built for designers, architects and decorators. It composes four to six works around a single project — one Edit per home. After a short scoping call, your Edit is presented within five working days: a moodboard, the scope, terms, lead time and total. From sign-off, production runs six to ten weeks, with photographs at sketch, mid-stage and finishing. Edits come in three tiers by scale; anything larger than the Edit envelope moves to a full Consultancy programme.
What to brief us
You don't need to specify the art — that's our work. You need to hand over the project as you see it:
- Floor plans and the rooms that matter. Where art is a moment, and where it's a quiet note.
- The scheme. Palette, materials, lighting, and the feeling you're after.
- The client. Their taste, what they react to or collect, and the budget envelope.
- The timeline. Your install date, worked backwards.
- The relationship. Whether you keep the client and present the work as your own, or we work with them directly on the art.
Commission, or source
Designers don't want a catalogue; they want work that fits the room. Most Edits are a mix: pieces made for the project by our in-house studio and by established Indian artists — among them Paresh Maiti and Bose Krishnamachari — alongside sourced works, including modern masters such as M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza where a brief calls for it. What's commissioned is sized and composed to the wall it will live on; what's sourced is chosen to sit with it.
Why this is still rare in India
In the US and UK, designers have long had trade art programmes to lean on — a single partner who works to the scheme and handles the art end to end. In India, art is still usually pieced together: a gallery here, a print there, a last-minute commission. A dedicated programme for the trade — one that works to your scheme, commissions to the room and ships across the country — is, for now, close to the only one of its kind here. We run it from Kolkata and deliver pan-India.