Just like the kind of magic that brought Geppetto’s fairytale puppet Pinocchio to life, Priyanka Shah, 33, founder of the Surat-based multi-disciplinary studio Shed, has been blessed with a vision that animates even the most evocative fever dream. Magical carousels that spin to reveal a minuscule Arthur Hailey book next to a tiny bathtub, circular winding staircases that wrap around floor-to-ceiling bookcases, leaping tigers, hawks soaring over tall glass trees or tiny chocolate chip cookies on a giant cupcake, it all comes alive at the touch of a gear.
Shah did not start off designing furniture and products. “I have always been that kid who drew well and made things well. I think I knew early on that I wanted to study architecture. A couple of really cool homes got built in my family, and that piqued my interest.” Exposure to the arts, whether in the form of good design or training to play the sitar, was a given in Shah’s household.
Priyanka Shah
That is what sent her to Parsons School of Design in New York. But in college, architecture felt too long drawn out, and she ended up “switching gears in college and got more into furniture”. Shah leads a team of 45 members, including carpenters and masons.
London Design Fair
Being from a business family, she knew to make “practical choices”. This led her to choose a “professional practice that would not stop” when she stopped.
So, soon after college and some travel, she moved into the basement of the family’s factory in 2015, with a motley crew of carpenters, masons, designers and craftsmen. “We just started inhabiting that space, got some machines, and just went with the flow.”
A product by Shed.
Shah’s debut product line drew inspiration from an unbuilt school playground project, resulting in a series of wooden tables modelled on traditional Indian board games such as Navkankari (Nine Men’s Morris), Hasu Chirate Aata (Cows & Leopards), and Chaupar (a Ludo variant).
One of the first products they designed was “a series of game tables. These were tables, coffee tables of different sizes that had these patterns of Indian board games, which I had researched for a while at that point”. But what got Shed, her venture, a lot of eyeballs was ‘The Bead’, or spheres of wood, “which had a concealed screw, and each could attach to another sphere endlessly in one direction”. She created all of these pieces on “a whim and it became table legs or candle stands and so on. We always think it is important to photograph and document every process of the work. Friends of mine from Mumbai came and shot this, and we put it on social media. And that’s when we got noticed by this curator for the London Design Fair”.
A product by Shed.
Although it was more of a trade show, being chosen as one of the 12 new and well-known designers to be showcased in the India Pavilion in 2016 garnered her a lot of notice back home.
Growth after that was fairly organic. “We exhibited and sold some things and did collection after collection of plateware, serveware, toys and games,” she says. There is not even a trace of self-consciousness when Shah says ‘toys and games’ because playfulness is part of the design DNA here. Be it the spinning coaster in the bar counter at Papa’s, the hip restaurant in Mumbai, or a kaleidoscope concealed in a home bar, “as long as play is part of it”, it appeals to Shah. Papa’s is an intimate yet loud 12-seater chefs’ counter restaurant where Chef Hussain Shahzad provides a dining experience that is playfully Indian.
A product by Shed.
Play store
“I think all our products tend to have that playful element. As an idea, it is extremely important to me. Be it board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Snakes and Ladders or foosball, that we have done, or the spinning tops and the carrom boards,” she says. The carrom boards, especially, have become quite the calling card for Shah.
“Everybody’s reaction to the carrom is a sense of disbelief. Like they just cannot believe that there is a carrom board like this,” she laughs. But it is not every day that one comes across marble carrom boards, featuring otherworldly mythical creatures — vermillion dragons, lapis birds, leaping sandstone tigers and tortoises whose shells form the pockets for the carrom board. First commissioned as a relatively simple carrom board for Subko Coffee Roasters — a specialty bakehouse and cacao brand in Mumbai and Bengaluru — the studio has now gone on to design more ambitious sets. While one is an ode to the pixelated double ikat pattern of Patola weave, another depicts the kaleidoscopic whorl of the city of Mumbai or the geometric beauty of a South Indian courtyard depicting Athangudi tiles, wooden doors and a central urli brimming with lotuses.
It is easy to get lost in the details of Shed’s creations. So much so that you forget to ask what it is for. Take the carousels, for example. Spinning tiered carousels “that are toys in their own right” are often replete with tiny whimsical details — a cupcake carousel with teeny tiny pastries that is “part dessert, part daydream, made from wood, clay, brass and mischief”; a library carousel featuring a 40-year-old aesthete’s passions, “books, libraries, vintage cars, fine wine”; or the massive Fantasy Forestland carousel that features marble hares on ground, eagles mid-flight high above and jungle cats pacing in their stony lairs. But do they serve any function other than just giving joy?
A product by Shed.
“No, it is absolutely an object of joy and play only; there is no other function to it. But now I think people have really started to embrace the idea of a carousel encompassing the autobiographical idea of people’s lives,” she says.
“It’s a souvenir of someone’s life,” she explains simply. As if recreating life and yet capturing it in its stillness do not necessarily have to be in opposition.
The writer is an independent journalist and consultant.
Published – August 15, 2025 08:34 pm IST
