These days, nothing surprises Eeshaan Kashyap. “It’s the new normal,” he says, smiling from his Zoom tile, referring to the sort of commissions currently crossing his desk. A ruby-studded knife to slice a wedding cake. And more recently, a thali set emblazoned with jade. Then again, for Kashyap, what’s normal anyway?
At 40, most roads in his world lead back to food. A trained chef who no longer cooks professionally, Kashyap treats the table less as furniture and more as theatre—a platform where material, memory and meal collide. “Food sits at the heart of everything I make,” he says. It’s not a pivot so much as a philosophy, one now travelling to Hyderabad in the form of Mise-en-Scène, a multi-sensory tableware exhibition mounted in collaboration with gallerist and interior designer Supraja Rao and Nitya Reddy of Signature Developers, running from 27-28 February 2026 at Kadari Gallery. If Kashyap brings the mise, Rao and Reddy bring the scène—and, crucially, the city.
Kashyap’s practice extends well beyond the kitchen. He has collaborated with design heavyweights such as Christian Louboutin and the Vitra Design Museum, and maintains a selective retail presence in India through Ogaan and Le Mill. Yet it is his larger-than-life pop-ups—annual, one-off spectacles staged across Indian cities—that have truly captured the public imagination, revealing his practice at its most exuberant. So brazen is his instinct for experimentation that no material is off limits—not even paper, water or ice, each pressed into service with the same irreverent curiosity as brass or jade.
To see Hyderabad through the three of them is to encounter a city that delights in duality: opulence and restraint, old-world nostalgia and new ambition, biryani and brutalism. “We respond to what the city is ready for,” says Rao, 56, a proud Hyderabadi who began her career in the early ’90s, when interior design in India was still finding its footing. Over time, her work expanded from spatial design into curation, eventually leading her to establish Kadari Gallery—now one of the city’s most respected contemporary art spaces, and the home for Kashyap’s theatrical takeover.
Under his hand, the gallery is almost unrecognisable. Custom cloudlike wallpaper climbs the walls; metallic carpets glint under carefully plotted lighting. Six chromatic rooms unfold in sequence: neon pink punched with gold, then purples, yellows and reds, before sunsetting into blues and greys. The objects themselves are equally animated. Wire mesh baskets nod to African weaving traditions, reframed with a contemporary sensibility. Matka-inspired vases carry subtle Japanese inflections from a recent trip. There are graphic ceramic plates, brass hand-shaped thalis, resin candle stands and sculptural cutlery. Kashyap calls them “table jewellery”—pieces that flirt with the boundary between use and adornment. In Hyderabad, such expressiveness feels less rebellious and more at home.
Rao’s relationship with the metropolis, however, wasn’t instant. Having moved frequently as a child, she arrived in Hyderabad as a teenager rather reluctantly. “It took me a while to start loving it,” she admits. What won her over was its Nizami architecture. “Every building has its own identity—from the scale of the Nizam’s palaces to the detailing in old houses. That originality shapes how we approach the exhibition. It’s not about imitation; it’s about celebrating a city that has always done its own thing.” Fittingly, the gallery itself contains a boulder—a geological cameo that reminds visitors that Hyderabad’s rocky, storied terrain is never far from its interiors.
For Reddy, whose family has deep roots in the city and who now works within the family business, Hyderabad’s personality is inseparable from hospitality. “Homes are designed as much around entertaining as around architecture,” she says. She recently conceived Palate by Design, a two-day festival that paired seven restaurants with seven designers in a series of immersive, table-led installations—an ambitious undertaking that drew the city’s creative and culinary communities into the same room. If proof were needed, it lay there: hosting is not a footnote to culture here, but one of its main events.
That appetite manifests in scale. Unlike Mumbai, where Kashyap notes a preference for smaller, pared-back objects, Hyderabad leans in. “People here appreciate larger pieces,” he says. Mise-en-Scène obliges. Brass and cast metal take precedence over aluminium; stone, quartz, rose quartz and crystal appear alongside linen. Kashyap’s studio works across 18 materials and multiple verticals—a detail that reads like a spreadsheet until you encounter the exuberance it produces.
For Rao, presenting the exhibition at Kadari Gallery is about offering Hyderabad something that feels fresh yet familiar, an objects show attuned to the city’s long-standing culture of gathering, but spoken in a contemporary register. Reddy hopes it will convene like-minded people and reflect a city that is expanding creatively as confidently as it is architecturally.
Through their shared lens, Hyderabad reveals itself not only in monuments or markets, but in metals that gleam, textiles that drape and spices that linger. Here, design is not separate from life. It is simply how life is hosted—generously, ornamentally and always with seconds.
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