Homeward Bound: Anavila's New Home Collection Has Its Roots In The Landscape Of Her Village

What do you think of when you think of the place where you grew up? In 1988, the English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) wrote: "Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go."

The home in our minds can be a mythic, imagined place, the location of childhood memories, or the brick-and-mortar remainder of a broken relationship. It can represent the proverbial "room of one's own", the simple joys of eating and gardening, or hold the dullness of chores. In homegrown designer Anavila Misra's new home collection titled 'Seeding of an Identity', her childhood home in the village of Hashupur finds expression in textiles, furnishings, and objects for everyday living. "Home rests deep in my child-mind. And there is indeed something fascinating in the way a child understands home. Her first drawing of it is not just a house but often a landscape. For me that landscape begins in Hashupur. My village," she says.

The collection draws inspiration from the idea of the aangan, the traditional inward-facing courtyard that brings together domestic life and the natural world. In Misra's recollection, it is a space at the threshold of our interior and exterior lives — where people, animals, trees and rituals of ordinary life coexist, offering both the intimacy of belonging and the freedom to imagine the world beyond the familiar.

This duality informs the collection, which moves between the comfort of the familiar and the openness of an expansive landscape. Its palette takes cues from life in Hashupur, combining off-white, sand, and bark brown hues, while running stitches, quilting, raw edges, and motifs inspired by the surrounding wilderness lend the linen, kala cotton, khadi, cotton, and velvet textiles their distinctive character. The range encompasses soft furnishings for beds, tables, and the lounge, alongside wall art, kitchen textiles, and smaller accessories featuring embroidery, appliqué, and block printing techniques.

The collection extends Misra's longstanding interest in natural materials, traditional craftsmanship and the relationship between textiles and their makers. Since developing her signature linen saris, she has worked with artisan and weaving communities across India, including clusters in West Bengal and Jharkhand. Her approach brings traditional techniques into contemporary design while foregrounding the people and skills that sustain them.

Established in 2011, Anavila grew out of Misra's material experiments with indigenous textiles and traditional handloom techniques. With this new home collection, Misra returns to the landscape that first shaped her imagination and reimagines these textiles as vessels of memory and identity. The result is a collection that treats the in-between space of the aangan as a place built from textures, rituals, and memories accumulated over a life — all to make a home one's own.

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