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Kochi has no shortage of places to buy furniture. It has considerably fewer places to buy furniture that will still be in the family in fifty years, and telling the two apart from a showroom floor is harder than it should be.
This guide is about the second kind: solid, handmade teak furniture, and how to judge it in this city.
Kochi is one of the more punishing environments in India for furniture. Monsoon humidity sits high for months. Air near the backwaters and the coast carries salt. Interiors swing from that humidity to hard air-conditioning several times a day. Borer and termite are constant local realities.
Engineered board swells and delaminates in it. Softwoods move, split and get eaten. Heavy upholstery holds damp and eventually smells of it.
Teak survives because of what it is made of. Its natural oils and silica content resist water, rot and insect attack, and it is dimensionally stable enough to hold a joint through decades of seasonal movement. That is why the old houses of this coast used it for everything from roof structure to window frames — not tradition, but engineering.
Worth knowing which one you are standing in.
Large-format retail chains. Wide range, showroom stock, quick delivery, and mostly engineered board with veneer or laminate. Good for filling a rental or a first flat quickly. Not where heirlooms come from.
Online-first retailers. Enormous catalogues, aggressive discounting, some genuine solid wood alongside a great deal that is not. The pictures are excellent and you cannot lift the piece before you buy.
Premium and designer showrooms. Curated selections, often imported or commissioned from third-party manufacturers. The quality range here is the widest of any category, because “premium” describes a price point rather than a construction method.
Workshop makers. Studios that manufacture what they sell. The range is narrower, lead times are longer, and the person selling to you can usually tell you which craftsman cut the joints. Temple Town is in this category; so are a handful of others in Kerala.
None of these is dishonest. They are different products at different prices. The mistake is paying workshop prices for retail construction.
1. Ask the species by name. Not “hardwood”, not “wooden”. If the answer is teak, ask where it was grown — Indian plantation, Burma, African — because they differ considerably in density and oil content.
2. Ask whether it is kiln-dried. This matters more than the species. Timber that has not been seasoned to a stable moisture content will keep drying inside your home, shrinking and twisting and opening its joints while it does. It is invisible when you buy and unmissable three monsoons later.
3. Look at the edges and the underside. On solid timber the grain runs continuously around an edge, and the hidden surfaces look like the visible ones. Banded edges and a different material underneath mean veneered board.
4. Open a drawer all the way out. Dovetailed corners and a bottom panel sitting in a groove indicate cut joinery. Stapled corners and a nailed-on base indicate the other thing.
5. Push the top corner gently. A well-jointed frame does not rack. If it moves now, in a showroom, it will move more in ten years.
6. Check the back panel. Nobody styles the back. Solid or properly panelled backs are a good sign; stapled hardboard is a tell.
7. Ask who repairs it. This is the question that separates the categories fastest. A workshop can reset a joint, reweave cane and refinish teak decades later. An importer generally cannot, and will offer you a replacement instead.
Handmade teak is two to three times the price of its engineered-board equivalent, and there is no trick that makes it otherwise. The cost sits in four places: seasoned hardwood, which is slow-growing and expensive; the hours a craftsman spends cutting joinery rather than a machine spends drilling dowels; hand-applied finishes; and the fact that a made-to-order piece is built once, for one room, with no economies of scale.
What you get for it is a different lifespan. A solid teak piece can be sanded, re-jointed and refinished repeatedly. Bought once at three times the price, kept for fifty years instead of twelve, it is the cheaper object — and that calculation ignores the part that actually matters, which is that one of them accumulates meaning and the other accumulates wear.
Most serious handmade furniture in Kochi is made to order rather than taken from stock, and that changes how you should shop.
Temple Town makes what it sells, in its own workshop in Thrissur, from responsibly sourced, kiln-dried teak. Our Kochi showroom is 8,000 square feet over two floors inside the Museum of Kerala History at Edappally, in an old Kerala house we renovated rather than replaced.
We will also tell you honestly when we are not the right answer. If you need a full flat furnished in three weeks on a tight budget, a large-format retailer will serve you better than we will. What we are good at is the piece you intend to keep.
Look for workshop makers — studios that manufacture what they sell rather than reselling from third-party suppliers. Temple Town's Kochi showroom is inside the Museum of Kerala History at Koonamthai, Edappally. Ask any maker whether the timber is kiln-dried and who would repair the piece in twenty years.
Check the edges and hidden surfaces for continuous grain, open a drawer to look for cut joinery, and ask for the species by name and its origin. A heavy opaque stain over a pale timber is the most common way cheaper wood is passed off as teak.
In this climate, yes, for pieces you intend to keep. Teak's natural oils resist the humidity, rot and insects that damage other timbers, and solid teak can be repaired and refinished repeatedly rather than replaced.
Generally several weeks, depending on the piece and the workshop's schedule. Properly seasoned timber and hand-cut joinery cannot be rushed without showing it later.
Door widths, lift car dimensions, stairwell turns and ceiling height — especially for four poster beds, tall wardrobes and large dining tables. Confirm these before the order is placed, not after.
Every question in this guide can be asked of any maker in the city, including us. A shop that answers them easily is usually a shop worth buying from.
Temple Town is a furniture maker and interior design studio founded by Meera Pyarelal in Thrissur in 1999, working in the Heirloom Modernism idiom.
Related reading: Teak, rosewood or mahogany? · What makes furniture an heirloom?
