Designer j.j. valaya has chosen his studio well. It’s a place where muse can wander with ease. Stacked with curios from his travels across the world, Valaya uses a part of his production house at Manesar for his creative pursuits.

The sprawling room in a corner on the first floor of the building is aesthetic enough: scrolls from Hong Kong, a statue from Egypt, knick-knacks from Paris and St Petersburg in Russia, a huge Buddha idol and rows of magazines and catalogues stacked neatly on the floor. There’s a French window of sorts, which drenches the room with light and overlooks a manicured lawn. The other wall, behind the imposing desk, has a flaming orange jamevar shawl framed and mounted the other way round because the designer likes the soft richness of blurred corners.

“Everything starts here,” says Valaya, his face lit up by the pool of halogen warmth from his table lamp. “At the initial stage of any project, I think and work best alone. This is where all that happens,” he says. ‘All that’ includes the blueprint of the sketches and the collection details for each garment. It’s here that the designs are painstakingly drawn up before the field is thrown open to his team. “My studio is a world in itself. I have drawn it up in a way so that it has a work area and a semi-work area. I like huge open spaces because I believe in making my designs larger than life. I get withdrawal symptoms if I can’t make it to the studio even for a day,” he says.

... contd.