Born from a desire for relief in a world marked by hardship, soft-geometry’s philosophy is shaped by life in India, a poetic culture committed to individual expression, layered and delightfully imperfect craft and storytelling above functionality. Founders Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary’s immigrant experience in the USA has emphasised their interest in interpreting culture through design and their dreaming of a soft, handcrafted future in contemporary design.
Finding Softness in a Harsh World
With every piece we create, we look at a different dimension to softness. From then on, it is a two-person dance, sometimes delicate, sometimes rushed. Ideas begin as conversations before sketches. If it excites us in the abstract, we sketch loosely, passing a notepad, drawing over each other for days. Impatience takes over; I’ll grab materials and make a model to feel it in our hands. We go next to 3D models, evaluating the idea until the skeleton is figured out. Simultaneously, we are writing, weighing feelings around the theme we are exploring and translating into form. Then it becomes casting, sanding, breaking, repeat.
Materials and Themes
Our curiosity is often centred on processes that manipulate materials. We don’t have a preferred medium; our intent is to build a library of experiments rooted in finding softness. In five years, we’ve worked with steel, cane, upholstery, wool yarn, acrylic, repurposed wood, wax, resin, hemp and more.
Mirrors for Aliens came from our visa and green card applications, where we were constantly defined as ‘Non-Resident Aliens’. That sense of impermanence shaped the work. We reimagined the humble steel thali, an unbreakable Indian plate, as a mirror.
Vessel is the first in a series of sculptural vases inspired by the Malayalam script, open on both ends and shifting to find balance. It embodies that language is a vessel, holding culture, identity and belonging. Molecule is a rebuttal. Often assumed to be inspired by Sottsass or Memphis, it comes instead from the colourful homes of South India, which Sottsass himself spent years documenting.
Giving into a Poetic Impulse
One of our core values is that we aspire to create poetry. The ability of an object to reveal evidence of its maker or hold sentiment is a more interesting pursuit than its ability to store or seat. Our lives are limited and we believe the objects we live with need not be so.
The Long-Haired Sconces we released are an example. They remember rituals of home; Sunday afternoons of mothers oiling and braiding hair, hurried school mornings, special days with jasmine or jewellery. Now far from India, we repeat these gestures for each other. The sconces echo braids as they fall or stretch across a wall, carrying joy, ceremony or restraint.
The Future
We often feel like we’re translating in both directions, offering what’s familiar to us to those for whom it feels foreign and re-encountering our own cultural rituals with fresh eyes. Much of our practice lives in that space: sharing personal stories and domestic gestures from where we grew up in India with an audience here in America. Our work is self-portraits, made new every time via materials, rituals, memories and challenges; interpretations from two soft Indian kids who made a practice of it. Looking ahead, the narrative doesn’t change but it will deepen and keep growing from that place of softness as a way of seeing and as a way of being.
This article is an excerpt from Platform's November 2025 Bookazine. For more such stories, check out our Bookazines here.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Photography soft-geometry, Nate Garcia, Peter Favinger
Date 16.5.2026