Near my nani's house there was a small brass shop. My great-grandmother bought from it, then my nani, then my mother, and I would trail behind them, running my fingers along the cool edges of lamps and thalis while the grown-ups talked. The shopkeeper never let anything leave his counter without telling you exactly what it was. This one is cast, that one is sheet. This will darken with time, that one won't. This is worth what I'm asking. That one, honestly, isn't. My mother never needed to know brass. She only needed to know him.

Years later, setting up a home of my own, I found myself scrolling through brass urlis on my phone late one night. Dozens of them, each one beautiful in its photograph, each one with a price. And I realised I had no idea what I was looking at. What was it really made of? Would it last? Who had made it, and where? There was no one to ask. No voice behind the counter.

That quiet moment of not knowing is why Kothi Decor exists.

Think back to the kothi you grew up visiting. The heavy wooden doors that took two hands to push open. The floors, cool under bare feet on a May afternoon. The puja room, where incense and ghee had long since soaked into the walls. The brass lota that nobody remembered buying, because it had simply always been there. The good cups, kept wrapped in the almirah, brought out only when guests arrived. No one asked where these things came from or whether they would last. They just did, because someone, long ago, had bought them from a person they knew and trusted, a person who told them the truth.

Somewhere along the way, we lost that. Things began arriving from nowhere in particular, wrapped in words that promised everything and meant very little: premium, handcrafted, authentic. And the simplest question of all, "What is this really made of?", stopped having an answer you could believe.

Kothi Decor began with one wish: to bring that shopkeeper back. Not the shop, but the honesty.

So every piece we make comes with its own fact card, telling you plainly what it's made of, how it was crafted and where it comes from. These are the things he would have told you across the counter. We work with artisans whose hands carry the skill of generations, and we would always rather tell you the truth about a piece than dress it up as something it isn't.

And like him, we don't disappear once the sale is made. If something isn't right, tell us. We'll listen, and we'll make it right. That's how trust was always built in our families: one honest conversation at a time.

We hope the pieces you bring home from us stay. We hope they darken gently, gather their own stories, and one day live in someone else's memory of your home, the way those old things in the kothi live on in ours.