Pune-based designer Sonia Revankar is on a mission to jazz up your wooden furniture by hand-painting unique designs and motifs onto wine chests, bar stools, dressers, mirrors, ottomans and consoles
Pune-based designer Sonia Revankar is on a mission to jazz up your wooden furniture by hand-painting unique designs and motifs onto wine chests, bar stools, dressers, mirrors, ottomans and consoles
From fairy tales to pirate trails, treasure hunts and wooden chests filled with riches have shared an inseparable connect. Perhaps the allure of it lies in the elegance and charm of wooden surfaces. Thirty-year-old Pune-based designer Sonia Revankar was bitten by this bug and changed tracks in life for the sheer love of wood.
The Chestnutu00a0 Box mini-bar which blends colonial times with ethnic design
Carve, create
In 2007, she teamed up with her husband Bipin to start Lively-wood, which offers customised designs on wood. Despite having no formal training in art (she pursued a Masters in International Business from France), she plunged head on and was surprised with the response. It helped that she had run an imported handicraft store when she moved to USA.
"Lively-wood originated from my frustration in finding alternative wooden products. Through my label I attempted to offer customised eclectic woodwork unlike mass-produced products available at malls," said Revankar, who admits that painting was a childhood hobby for her. The name Lively-wood reflects her attempt to make wooden products more funky and is also a pun on livelihood.
Her range of products includes bars, mirrors, cabinets, dressers, drawers, ottomans, bookshelves, wine cellars, buffets, stools and coffee tables. While the item may be small or large, Revankar promises to jazz it up using acrylic and oil paints. If you have a certain theme, colour or design in mind, Revankar will be happy to execute it for you but if you draw a blank, she is also ready to conjure designs from her repertoire. Her personal bias is for ethnic designs but she doesn't let that affect her creations which are solely focussed on
complementing the living space.
No babe in the woods
Today, Revankar single-handedly manages Lively-wood with help from her team of artists and carpenters. Being a labour-intensive venture, Revankar spends anywhere from five days for designing smaller creations to 15 days for larger products. Each object is given a layer of colour, left to dry and coated with varnish after designs are etched onto them. She also upcycles by incorporating ghungroos, beads, broken bangles and wood shavings in her creations.
While she considers each project a challenge, she still remembers the truck-themed mirror she had designed for one of her clients with messages such as 'Horn OK Please'. The designer's second love is photography and camera in tow she loves to capture people, colour combinations and motifs.
Those images often act as a key when she finds herself stranded for ideas. Her blog also mentions day-to-day incidents of spotting a colourful handcart or a villager wearing a bright red turban as inspiration springboards. "My backpacking journeys across Tanzania, Peru, Hawaai, Mexico, Kenya, Europe and the UAE also serve as great inspiration and I try to reflect those motifs in my creations," she concludes.
Call: 09881099886
Email: livelywood@gmail.com
Log on to: www.lively-wood.com / www.lively-wood.blogspot.com
Cost: Rs 2,500 onwards
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