HOUSE OF KANDADU

“Almost 25 years ago, along the Coromandel Coast, a local chief showed me—nestled along a quiet path lined with hundred-year- old trees—an incredible house.”

- Writer Cosmo Brockway Photographer Krishna Tangirala

So begins embroiderer Jean-François Lesage, reminiscing about the moment his South Indian home, Kandadu House, came into his life. We sit in the balmy air of his pre-monsoon garden as he warms to his story. “This coquettish old lady seemed to be waiting for me.

The owners’ family had long since left her; she had stood there proudly for 150 years, resisting the onslaught of the rains as best she could.” He talks as though remembering a great love, eyes glimmering with emotion. “She was still dignified, a little dishevelled but forgetting nothing of her past grandeur.”

After two years of restoration, the burnt-ochre manor house stands now as a place of community. It is in this spirit that the Frenchman began to reflect on the future of his walled dreamland and his evolving role within it. He longed for a direction that might bring the house into a new chapter of creating and patronage.

A chance meeting with a young designer, Harsh Parekh, recently returned from a decade of working in haute couture in Paris, was an instant coup de foudre. The duo began a dialogue about collaborating on a brand that would pay homage to their shared love of textiles and the aesthetic of 18th-century trade between India and Europe. Bringing in another talent, Alexis de Ducla, a Frenchman passionate about craft and design—who has lived in India for two decades—created the perfect triune partnership. “And so,” says Lesage, “House of Kandadu was born: a place, a family, a textile project.”