Jay Gorsia: Kolkata’s answer to Britain’s Timothy Oulton

Jay Gorsia has been designing high-end furniture for the rich and the famous. He now wants to make a business of curating furniture.

- Pawan Lall

He is the epitome of laid-back cool—until I ask him about a table saw in his studio-cum-showroom. Furniture designer Jay Gorsia, Kolkata’s answer to Britain’s Timothy Oulton, suddenly goes engineer on me when he discusses that saw. Most electric table saws are made to cut anything efficiently—wood, the table, your hand... But not this one, says Gorsia, with all the passion of the newly converted. This saw stops in less than five milliseconds if it comes in contact with human skin.

(One millisecond is one-thousandth of a second.) It’s all very fancy, but the reason Gorsia is so delighted with it is that it allows him and other craftspeople to focus on the intricacies of design, without having to constantly worry about sacrificing a finger to their craft. But this is not about how Gorsia is adopting technology to produce furniture that’s easily on a par with the finest European design houses. I’m meeting Gorsia after more than five years (I last met him in 2011, to write about Kolkata’s Chippendale; Fortune India, October 2011), and I find that little has changed in his 25,000 sq. ft. studio other than the addition of new tools. It’s still eerie that a furniture workshop does not have sawdust underfoot and wood-shavings sticking to your shoes.

This time around, I’m here to figure out if Gorsia is going to be the big “Indian” designer label in furniture. He has been around long enough, his client list is enviably snooty, and he’s able to sell at high prices to customers who don’t mind waiting for a Gorsia piece. But no. “That I could have done any time,” Gorsia says scornfully when I ask about the designer label.