Our Story
I have been trying to write this page for a while now. Every time I sit down to do it, it ends up sounding like a brand bio, and Forty Eight is anything but that. So let me just tell you the story the way I would tell it to a friend.
The candles followed. Hand-poured, with bases in metal, wood, and glass, each one chosen with the kind of quiet deliberateness I have always admired in her. She built Forty Eight as a sanctuary, a place to make sensory, beautiful things for people's homes, and to genuinely mean every single one of them. That intention has never left the brand. It is still the soul of everything we do.
It Started with My Mother, in 2024, and if you knew her, you would understand immediately why. She is the kind of person who notices the quality of light in a room. Who spends time choosing a fragrance because she knows it will change how a space feels when you walk into it. She began working with resin first, drawn to the way pigments move and bloom in ways you cannot fully predict or control. That quality, the beautiful unpredictability of it, became the first language of this brand.
The candles followed. Hand-poured, with bases in metal, wood, and glass, each one chosen with the kind of quiet deliberateness I have always admired in her. She built Forty Eight as a sanctuary, a place to make sensory, beautiful things for people's homes, and to genuinely mean every single one of them. That intention has never left the brand. It is still the soul of everything we do. I have been living and working in the United Kingdom for a few years, with Studio 48 Interior Design. I loved the work, the spatial thinking, the sourcing, and the process of putting a room together with so much care and attention. But I kept finding myself drawn back to my roots, to craft, to things made by hand rather than by specification sheet.
Joining my mother felt completely natural. She had already built something with a soul. What I wanted to bring to it was the designer's perspective, a structural eye to work alongside her artist's instinct. I introduced two crafts that I had fallen in love with through my design years, Hand-Knotted and Hand-Tufted Rugs, and Dhokra Art. I knew, without question, that it had to be part of what we were building.
My mother and I are quite different people, which is probably exactly why this works. She feels a room; I measure it. She trusts a colour in her gut; I think about it in relation to everything else. But we share one conviction completely: the things in your home should be made with care, made by hand, and made for you specifically, not for a general market, not in bulk, not without thought.
The Symphony of Elements, our guiding philosophy, is really just that belief given a name. It is the idea that a home finds its voice when contrasts are honoured: the gloss of resin beside the rough warmth of brass; a hand-poured candle beside the geometry of a woven rug; the ancient beside the contemporary. When these things come together with intention, a home stops being a collection of objects and starts telling a story.
Every product we make is handmade. Every product is made for you, your space, your palette, your brief. There are no two identical pieces in the world, because there are no two identical homes. We are a mother and daughter, based in India, making things by hand for people who care about their spaces as much as we do. Every order we receive feels like an invitation into someone's home, and we never take that lightly. From our home to yours, welcome to the family.
With Love,
Neera & Akanksha xx