Kindling new styles

trees that were chopped off to widen the road? Chances are that they may have found their way to a 900-sq ft carpentry workshop in south Delhi's Chhattarpur area.

Here Jamie Styles, a former executive with a Dutch broadcast encryption company and now a self-styled furniture designer and manufacturer, puts the wood from felled trees to use "" for designing furniture.

Styles, who hails from north England, held his first furniture exhibition in Delhi some time back. He set up styles:interiors a year ago.

"While most people prefer teak furniture to make an aesthetic statement, neem and jamun trees end as firewood. Their wood has no commercial use," explains the furniture designer.

Yet, Styles loves to make tables and chairs out of this wood which "has the most beautiful weathered surface".

A stickler for retaining the "positive natural properties" of the wood, Styles has named part of his furniture the Ayurveda collection.

"I don't touch the natural rough edges of the pieces and play with their original shapes to make something out of it," he says.

Instead of nails, he uses traditional wood joints called dowel and coats the pieces with natural polish. "You have to respect the spirit of these woods," he says.

Among his designs is a 10-ft chaise longue, or "chaise log" as he likes to call it. It has been carved out of a huge neem tree he found lying near the Chhattarpur temple.

The jamun trees are turned into relax chairs while the wood from the neem and mango trees is used to make tables, consoles and chairs.

Note, no part of the tree is wasted: the barks become 7-ft tall standing lights and the roots of the trees are used to recreate mood lights.

Spare eucalyptus wood is turned into wood bowls and baskets, and wood slices are turned into diya stands. Most of these products are priced between Rs 2,000 and Rs 8,000.

After a year of hard work, Styles, is eventually getting big orders. He has supplied furniture to Aman Resort in Bhutan and the British School in Delhi.

Recently, he designed a terrace garden for a Okhla-based corporate house and created a bamboo canopy called the Singing Pagoda "" when the wind blows, the bamboo whistles.

Currently, he's designing an Ayurveda room for architect Serbjeet Singh's new residence and has bagged the design contract for an office of a business school in Delhi.

Besides farm house projects, Styles also designs mid-range objets d'art for The Home Store and gift accessories for the National Geographic Channel.

On a purely commercial scale, Styles has also launched a low-priced furniture range. "It's aimed at the young who are just setting up home. The sizes are more standardised so that they can keep adding on items every month like a bookshelf or a TV console as the budget permits," he says.

Besides this, Styles is also working on a new line of furniture he calls "initial furniture" that plays with the initials of your name. Currently he's designing a furniture with initials for a jewellery store.

So is Styles expanding his business? "I'm thinking of retailing my goods in a store but volume is a dangerous game for a small set-up," he says.