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Garden in Woods by Intent Made: A Marquetry Collection by Designer Swetha Vegesana
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 29 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Intent Made is an Indian furniture brand whose work is built around solid wood and the craft traditions that have developed around it, and the Garden in Woods collection, designed by Swetha Vegesana, is the most complete expression yet of the direction the brand has been moving in. The collection consists of center tables and side tables, all made from solid timber and featuring marquetry work on their surfaces that takes considerable time to appreciate, as the more you look, the more you find within it.
Swetha Vegesana, who leads the design work at Intent Made, has developed her practice around an understanding of wood as a material with its character, grain, tone, and natural variation, and that position runs through every decision made in Garden in Woods. The collection does not use applied color or artificial embellishment anywhere across its surfaces. Everything that reads as pattern, depth, contrast, or image comes entirely from the natural properties of the timber itself, which is where the marquetry discipline becomes central to understanding what these pieces are doing and how much work has gone into making them.
Marquetry is the practice of assembling different pieces of wood, each selected from a different species for what its natural tone and grain contribute, into a surface composition that uses the variation between those species to create pattern and image. It is a technique with a long history in furniture making and one that demands a level of precision and patience that is rarely seen in contemporary production. In Garden in Woods, Vegesana uses marquetry to build checkerboard surfaces from contrasting solid wooden pieces and then introduces within that geometric framework a series of figurative motifs: birds perched on slender branches and butterflies suspended mid-flight, each one hand-cut and assembled from different varieties of solid wood. The birds and butterflies are not printed or applied onto the surface. They are built into it, piece by piece, from timber.
The checkerboard grid that runs across the table surfaces establishes the structural logic of the collection, a disciplined and ordered framework that speaks to balance, repetition, and geometric precision. Within that grid, the birds and butterflies introduce a counterpoint, a sense of quiet movement and organic life that sits in deliberate tension with the geometry around it. The contrast between the rigor of the checkerboard and the lightness of the figurative elements is what gives the collection its particular quality, and it is a tension that Vegesana has clearly been thinking about carefully, because it is resolved without either element overpowering the other.
The oval center tables add a gentle touch to the geometric design, with their rounded edges reflecting the natural patterns on their surfaces, while the square side tables keep everything balanced, creating spots of order and rest within the overall layout. The bases across the collection are fluted solid wood, a detail that adds a quiet architectural quality to the pieces and gives them a grounded physical presence that the delicacy of the marquetry surfaces might otherwise work against. Warm wood tones run through the entire collection and are chosen to work with natural light and with the textiles and upholstery that typically surround center and side tables in a domestic interior.
No two tables in the Garden in Woods collection are identical because each piece of wood has a unique grain and tone, and this individuality is intentionally incorporated into the making process rather than resulting from inconsistency. These tables reward attention, and their craft is subtle at first but becomes clear the longer you look.
Garden in Woods is available through Intent Made. The full collection can be explored at intentmade.in and the brand can be followed on Instagram at intentmade.
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