Lippan art, handmade to order in Gurugram

What Lippan art actually is

Lippan kaam — literally 'mud work' — comes from the Kutch region of Gujarat, where it was traditionally applied to the interior walls of bhungas, the round mud houses of the area. A paste of clay and camel dung was pressed into raised patterns on the wall, and pieces of mirror were set into the design.

The mirrors were not decoration alone. In a house lit by a single oil lamp after dark, dozens of small mirrors spread that light around the room. The craft is practical before it is beautiful, which is true of most village art.

What I make is the same craft moved onto boards, so it can hang in a flat in Gurugram rather than be built into a wall. The technique is unchanged: the pattern is drawn, the clay relief is raised by hand line by line, the mirrors are set while it is still workable, and each layer dries before the next one goes on.

What the word Lippan means

Lippan comes from lip, or lipan, in the Kutchi and Gujarati dialect. It means to plaster, to apply, or to smear, which is exactly what the hand does to the clay.

So the name describes the method rather than the look. The craft is named after the act of pressing wet clay onto a surface, not after the mirrors everybody notices first.

The mirrors have their own word. They are abhla, and lippan kaam is the full name of the work, kaam meaning work or labour.

The meaning matters when you are buying, because it tells you what you are paying for. You are buying hours of hand-laid clay. The mirrors are the finish, not the substance.

Why it takes the time it takes

Every raised line is laid by hand. There is no mould and no press, so two pieces from the same drawing are never quite identical — the thickness of a petal, the angle a mirror catches the light.

Drying is the part people do not expect. Clay relief has to dry slowly and evenly between layers or it cracks, and that pace depends on the size of the piece, how deep the relief is and the weather that week. In practice a single piece takes about a week from the day you approve the design. Larger quantities take longer, and delivery time is on top of that.

Made for your wall, not from a catalogue

Most of what I make starts with someone sending a photo of an empty wall. From that I work out what size will sit right, which shapes suit the space, and which colours pick up what is already in the room.

You see a design before anything is made. Nothing gets built until you have approved the drawing, the size and the price.

Round mandala forms are the most requested, but Lippan works just as well as a square panel, a pair of long vertical pieces either side of a doorway, or a name plate for an entrance.

Where a Lippan piece works best

Living room walls above a sofa or console, where the mirrors have light to work with. Entrance walls and foyers, which is where name plates usually go. Pooja rooms, where the traditional association is strongest.

Keep it indoors and away from steady moisture. A balcony wall that gets rain, or a bathroom, will shorten the life of a clay piece considerably.

Two walls get asked about constantly and both are tricky. The first is the wall behind a dining table, which is usually fine, except in flats where the dining area sits directly under the kitchen exhaust run and collects a film of cooking grease. Grease on textured clay is not something you can brush off. The second is the stairwell wall in a duplex, where the piece ends up viewed from below and from an angle, which flattens the relief and kills most of what the mirrors do. If that is the wall you have, hang it lower than feels right, at the eye level of someone standing on the landing rather than centred on the height of the wall.

Bedroom walls behind the headboard work well and are underused. The light is usually softer there, which suits a piece with less mirror and more clay, and it is one of the few walls in a flat that nothing else is competing for.

Avoid the wall directly opposite a large window if you can. Strong backlight puts the relief in silhouette for most of the day and you lose the shadow entirely. Perpendicular to the window is almost always better than facing it.

The studio is in Sector 67, off Sohna Road

The studio is at Pyramid Urban 67 A, on Badshahpur Sohna Road in Sector 67. That is the stretch running south past Subhash Chowk, where Gurgaon starts thinning out towards Sohna and the tower blocks give way to low buildings and empty plots.

Visits are by appointment. I work alone, and most days there is clay drying flat on a board that cannot be moved, so turning up unannounced usually finds the door shut. Message first and I will tell you what is actually in the studio that week.

A visit gets you one thing a photograph cannot. Lippan is relief work, and relief is depth. A photo flattens it into a pattern. Standing in front of a piece, you see the clay lines stand proud of the board by two or three millimetres, you see the shadow each line throws, and you watch the mirrors change as you move your head. People who come in almost always revise what size they thought they wanted, usually upward.

It also lets you hold the weight. A board of dried clay is heavier than it looks, and a lot of the questions I get about fixings answer themselves once someone has picked one up.

If you cannot get to Sector 67, that is fine, and most orders are handled entirely over WhatsApp. But if you are already somewhere on Sohna Road, it is a short detour and it tends to save a round of back and forth about size.

What Gurgaon walls are actually made of

Drill into a bedroom wall in a newer Gurgaon tower and there is a fair chance you hit nothing. Internal partitions in a lot of recent construction are gypsum board on a metal stud frame, which is hollow between studs. A plug pushed into that holds almost nothing. The piece comes off the wall at two in the morning and you find out the hard way.

The walls worth knowing about here are roughly four.

Gypsum or AAC block partitions, common in towers built in the last decade or so, especially between bedrooms and around wardrobes. Light, quick to put up, and hollow or soft. These need either a toggle fixing that opens out behind the board, or a screw driven into the metal stud itself, which you find with a magnet.

RCC structural walls, the concrete ones. Solid, and they will hold anything, but you need a hammer drill and a masonry bit, and on a shear wall you want to be sure you are not near reinforcement.

Brick with plaster, which is what most of the older Gurgaon housing is. The friendliest of the four. An ordinary wall plug does the job.

And the one that catches people out, POP. Plaster of Paris is often run over a false ceiling edge or a feature wall, and it looks and sounds solid until a screw goes in and takes a cone of it out with it. POP is a finish, not a structure. Whatever is behind it is what you are actually fixing to.

This matters more for Lippan than for a canvas because the weight is concentrated. A canvas spreads a kilo over a metre of stretcher bar. A Lippan board puts everything on one or two hanging points, and the board itself is rigid, so it does not forgive a fixing that is slowly pulling out.

None of this is hard, it is just worth knowing before you start drilling. If you send me a photo of the wall, I can usually tell from the skirting, the switch plates and the age of the building which of the four you are dealing with, and what fixing to buy. The method itself is covered properly in the wall art guide.

Old Gurgaon, new Gurgaon, and the walls in between

Gurgaon is really two cities with the Delhi Jaipur highway between them, and the two halves have quite different walls.

On the older side, DLF Phases 1 to 5, Sushant Lok, South City, Palam Vihar, the buildings are mostly brick and plaster, the rooms are smaller, and the ceilings are standard height. Walls here tend to already be busy, with a console or a sideboard against them. A single round panel of around 18 to 24 inches usually sits better than anything larger, and it works hardest above furniture rather than floating on an empty wall.

Golf Course Road and the Extension are the opposite problem. The towers there have double height living rooms and long uninterrupted walls, often three metres or more of blank plaster facing a sofa. A 24 inch piece disappears on a wall like that. It reads as a dot. Those rooms want either one genuinely large panel or a group of three or five pieces hung as a set, and a set is often the better answer because it can follow the shape of the wall rather than fight it.

Sohna Road and the sectors around it, 47 through 70, sit between the two. Mid rise, reasonable ceilings, and usually one wall in the living room that is the obvious candidate. This is also where most of my local orders come from, which is partly just proximity.

New Gurugram, the sectors out past Dwarka Expressway in the 76 to 95 range, is the newest construction and the most likely to be gypsum partition. Big flats, thin internal walls. Worth checking what you are fixing into before you choose a size, because the fixing constrains the weight and the weight constrains the piece.

Cyber City, Udyog Vihar and the office stock around them are a different brief again, usually reception walls and meeting rooms, and that is covered on the office page rather than here.

None of this is a rule. It is just what I have noticed about which sizes get asked for from where, and it saves a conversation if you already know your wall is the three metre kind.

Buying from a maker in the same city

A clay relief panel in the back of a courier van is a gamble. I pack for it, and pieces do travel to Europe and the USA intact, but every extra transfer between vehicles is another chance for a corner to take a knock. If you are in Gurgaon, most of that risk simply is not there. The piece goes from the studio to you, once.

The second thing is that you can see it before it is yours. I send photographs at the drawing stage and again when the piece is finished, but a photograph is still a photograph. Local buyers can come and look at the real thing under real light before it leaves.

Then there is the part nobody thinks about until later. Clay chips. A mirror can come loose after a few years, or a corner catches a door. If the person who made the piece is a twenty minute drive away, that is a small repair rather than a shipping problem. I have written separately about what can be fixed and what cannot.

And colour. Screens lie about colour, consistently and in both directions. If you are matching a piece to a particular sofa or a particular shade of wall paint, being in the same city means you can bring a cushion cover or a paint chip to the studio and settle it in a minute instead of over four rounds of photographs.

What you give up by buying locally rather than from a marketplace is speed and a return button. There is no next day delivery here and nothing is sitting in a warehouse, because the piece does not exist until you order it. That is the trade.

Dust, damp, and the Gurgaon year

March to June, everything in this city is covered in a fine layer of dust within about a week of being cleaned. Lippan is textured, so it catches more of it than a flat surface does, and the dust settles into the grooves between the raised clay lines where a cloth will not reach.

A dry soft brush handles it. An old paintbrush, a clean makeup brush, anything with soft bristles that gets into the relief. Thirty seconds a month, and it stays sharp.

What you must not do is reach for a damp cloth, which is the instinct with dust. The clay is not sealed glass. Water softens it and lifts the surface, and the damage is not always obvious until it dries.

The monsoon brings the opposite problem. Humidity in Gurgaon through July and August sits high enough that anything porous takes up moisture from the air. Clay relief hung on an external wall, especially a north or west facing one that stays cool and damp, can draw moisture through the plaster behind it. That is the main reason I say keep it on an internal wall. Not because the piece is fragile, but because a wall that stays damp for two months a year will eventually tell on anything mounted flat against it.

Winter is the easy season, though air conditioning and room heaters both dry a room out faster than the natural swing does. Very rapid drying is what cracks clay. In practice a finished and fully cured piece is stable, and I have not had one come back from an AC problem, but it is a reason not to hang a piece directly in the blast of a split unit.

Construction dust is its own category. If there is building work in your tower, cover the piece or take it down. That dust is cement and silica, not house dust, and it is abrasive.

Delhi, Noida, Faridabad and the rest of NCR

The studio sits in Gurgaon. Most of what leaves it does not stay there.

Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Manesar are all routine. Pieces go out the same way they go anywhere in India, packed flat with the relief face protected, and for most of NCR the journey is short enough that it is barely a shipping question at all.

Studio pickup is an option for all of it if you would rather collect in person.

Beyond NCR, the piece travels as a parcel like any other order. Sector 67 to Bengaluru takes the same packing as Sector 67 to Berlin, just with less paperwork.

The glass in a Gurgaon tower is not clear glass

Most towers built here in the last fifteen years are glazed with tinted or reflective units, partly for the heat and partly because that is the look. The glass cuts a noticeable amount of visible light before it reaches the room, and it shifts the colour of what does get through, usually slightly green or slightly grey.

That matters for Lippan more than for a painting, because mirrors do not make light. They only move it around. A piece with heavy mirror work in a room with weak, cool daylight will read as dark and busy rather than bright.

Deep balconies make it worse. A lot of Gurgaon living rooms open onto a balcony two metres deep with a slab over it, which is good for keeping June out and bad for daylight in December. The wall facing that opening gets much less light than the floor plan suggests.

So orientation is worth checking before you pick a design. A south or west facing living room with clear sightlines can carry dense mirror work, and it will throw light around in the afternoon the way the craft was meant to. A north facing room behind a deep balcony cannot, and the better answer there is fewer, larger mirrors with more clay showing, in warmer colours, placed where a lamp or a wall light will hit it in the evening.

The evening point is the one people miss. In a flat with restricted daylight, the piece spends most of its visible life under artificial light anyway. If there is a wall light or a picture light near the wall you have in mind, tell me, because it changes what I would suggest. Warm light at a shallow angle across the relief is what makes the clay lines throw shadow, and the shadow is half the effect.

Should you buy Kutch work from Kutch?

Kutch is where this craft belongs, and there are artisans in and around Bhuj who have been laying clay since they were children, in families that have done it for generations. If you can buy from them, buy from them. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What is harder to get at that distance is a piece built for one specific wall. Most Lippan sold out of Kutch is made first and sold second, in the sizes that pack and travel well. If a 22 inch round is what you want, that is easy. If what you have is a 1.4 metre gap between a window frame and the edge of a bookshelf, and you want something that fits it exactly in colours that pick up a particular rug, that is a conversation, and conversations are hard to have across a language gap and a thousand kilometres.

The other difference is afterwards. A chipped corner or a loose mirror is a short trip here. From Kutch it is a shipping problem in both directions, and usually not worth it on a piece under a few thousand rupees.

I would put it this way. If you want a traditional piece and you care most about it coming from the place the craft comes from, buy from Kutch, and go in person if you ever get the chance, because the work you see there is extraordinary. If what you want is Kutch technique applied to a measured gap on your own wall, with someone you can message when it arrives and visit when it chips, that is what I do.

Both are legitimate. They are not quite the same purchase.

Questions before ordering