Unplugged

Unplugged sits in Jamshedpur, the steel town in the middle of Jharkhand and India's first planned industrial city, built from its founding around the act of making things. Its client, Anil Khemka, wanted something genuinely new for the city: a restaurant unlike anything Jamshedpur had seen. For the studio it became something rarer still, an open brief and a license to experiment, pushing at the very idea of what a restaurant interior could be. What began as a fit-out turned into a piece of research, carried out largely on site, in the open, by hand.

The governing idea was handmade, taken to an almost obsessive level. Rather than specify finishes from a catalog, the team made the building's surfaces from scratch. Every tile was cast by hand in bespoke molds, treating concrete not as a structural given but as a material to be pressed and shaped like clay. From these units the studio built a mathematical system of repeating modules, pushing an ordinary gray mix toward richness and depth. The design was worked out in real time between laptop and workbench, hands and dust.

Those handmade units accumulate into the architecture. Floors are laid in terrazzo studded with large broken pieces of marble, an oversized inlay reading almost as a landscape underfoot. Hand-plastered walls carry the cast tiles in coffered bands, resolving into a single hand-built monolith against warm timber, and even the columns are wrapped in the same corner tiles. Every surface carries the mark of the hand that made it.

The bar gathers the whole argument into one object: tile, timber, marble, and the offcuts of everything else, a deliberate 'waste of the waste' turned centerpiece. Furniture and lighting followed, handmade to a simple geometry. Unplugged is a process made visible: everything from nothing, a record of learning by making.