The Chitra Collection
Gallery design / Showcase design / Mount making
Named in memory of his beloved wife, Chitra, the Chitra Collection is an unusual private museum of historic and precious teawares created in 2011 by Nirmal Sethia. The collection includes historic and valuable teapots from around the world, and from the earliest origins of tea drinking, to celebrate the central role that tea has played in culture and society.
Because of the number of pieces - almost 2,000 - only a proportion could be displayed at any time. Our first challenge was therefore to design a gallery layout that could accommodate archival storage in addition to showcase displays, all of which were being positioned in the building’s basement vaults.
The gallery space was laid out with 15 linear meters of continuous, conservation-grade showcases on one side of a central aisle, with rolling archive storage installed opposite it. To further increase archival capacity, we introduced climate-conditioned storage directly beneath the showcase display areas. Access was provided to both objects on display and to objects in storage by way of 1.2m wide x 2.4m high flush-glass doors, all of which had to be manually lowered into the gallery via a street access point.
A team of two mount-makers worked closely with the curatorial team to display individual pieces on suspended glass shelves on four levels of display space. The mount arrangements they created helped bring the precious collection to life.
The Wellington Collection - Paintings | The Wellington Collection - Robes | The Cole Museum of Zoology | RCOG | Keats House | Garrard & Co | The Chitra Collection | National Army Museum | Birkenstock | Waterstones