No. 11 Sofa (Zanav Upholstery)

As alternatives to the checked upholstery and cushion fabrics of the original No. 11 Sofa seen in Geoffrey Bawa’s Colombo home, Phantom Hands worked with Bengaluru-based textile studio Zanav to develop a more adaptive capsule of understated neutrals. The challenge was balancing two distinct objectives: to create a fabric collection that felt contemporary and restrained, and simultaneously evoked Bawa’s signature sensibility. “It was quite a tricky proposition,” says Aparna Rao, co-founder of Phantom Hands.

The process began with a brief to Zanav’s founder Ravi Khemka, whose first move was to conduct a study on Barefoot—the Sri Lankan textile company that made the fabrics Bawa used. Khemka then selected from within Zanav’s archives, textiles that technically and materially recalled the Barefoot ones. The result of that extensive search was a plain weave from a fabric family that went by the name ‘Radhanagar’. Barefoot’s original fabric was woven in cotton—a choice shaped by the materials available in Sri Lanka at the time. Zanav’s Radhanagar added a layer of textural complexity to that foundation by using a blend of cotton and linen yarn.

Khemka’s aesthetic leans strongly towards minimalism, so when it came to adding a contemporary accent to the selection, he chose the Wimberlygunj—a striped fabric designed by Belgian textile designer Fabienne Collet, and woven on heritage looms. Collet had drawn from the Bauhausian tradition of geometric textile design to create these, and Rao recognised that the stripes of the Wimberlygunj echoed the ones on the original No.11 sofa’s medium cushions. Khemka concurred, with the understanding that upgrading the original patchwork cushion required a different approach. “The idea was to elevate value by interpreting the fabric in a way that recalled the original’s iconic stripes, but used materials and techniques that had moved with the times,” he says.

What most clearly sets Zanav’s fabrics apart though, is the open-air vat-dyeing process used for its yarn. The dyeing facility used by Zanav is one of the last few places still practicing this manual dyeing method, in which the yarn is submerged in large vats of water mixed with insoluble dye and a reducing agent. The yarn is then pulled out and dried until the dye oxidises and develops as colour. Because the ‘airing’ process relies on atmospheric oxygen, the oxidation is not a uniform process and no two hanks of vat-dyed yarn are identical. The colour carries a depth and irregularity that mechanical dyeing cannot replicate.

Once the fabrics were selected, Rao narrowed the palette down to five colours for the Radhanagar, and three for the Wimberlygunj. The palette as it stands has been judiciously edited so that any combination of colours drawn from across the two fabric families will work well together. Both fabric types in these combinations share the same plain-weave structure as the Barefoot fabrics used in Bawa’s original sofa, but the addition of linen, and the characteristic richness of vat-dyed yarns contemporises them for present-day spaces.