Silkworks

Silkworks is the curated retail expression of Karachi Engineering Co., a Mumbai business with deep roots in the decorative arts. Operating out of Worli, the house has spent years building relationships that span the Indian subcontinent and broader Asia, developing an eye for objects that carry genuine history. The name Karachi Engineering Co. hints at a provenance older than the city's current geography, suggesting a lineage of trade and connoisseurship that long predates the contemporary market for vintage objects. What Silkworks offers is not simply furniture or decoration, but a considered point of access to the material culture of another time.

The inventory at Silkworks moves between vintage decorative objects, sculpture and spiritual artefacts — categories that can overlap in unexpected ways when the source material comes from monasteries, family collections and the workshops of surviving craftspeople. The team works directly with estates, private families, dealers, monasteries and makers, which means the pieces that arrive at Worli have typically been assessed at source rather than accumulated through impersonal wholesale channels. This sourcing approach keeps the selection alive to things that might otherwise disappear unremarked into the market, and it gives each object a traceable story.

What distinguishes Silkworks from a general antiques dealer is the particular combination of categories it holds together: the domestic and the devotional, the decorative and the sculptural. Spiritual artefacts drawn from monastic and religious traditions sit alongside decorative objects intended for the home, asking the collector or the seeker to consider what those boundaries actually mean. For those who believe that objects carry the energy of their origins — the rooms they once inhabited, the intentions they once served — a curated source that understands provenance is worth knowing. Silkworks occupies that position with quiet authority.

Silkworks is worth visiting for anyone furnishing a home with care, building a collection of Asian decorative arts, or looking for a spiritual or devotional object with genuine history behind it. It would also interest designers, stylists and those who simply want to live surrounded by things that have been somewhere and meant something. The shop is based at Worli in Mumbai, within reach of the city's collector community and open to those making a dedicated visit. More about their current holdings can be found at silkworks.in.