Tour Rajiv Surendra’s NYC Apartment Filled With Handmade Decor...and Chalk Art! | Handmade Home Tour

[Music] hi i'm rajiv and this is my handmade home in new york city uh when people ask me what i do for a living i say i'm a movie star i'm a washed up movie star i kind of live an unusual life where leisure and my profession that the lines are very skewed something that was a hobby for 10 years for me sometimes becomes a profession that's why i spend a lot of time on doing the things that i love doing i started a business about 10 years ago doing calligraphy called letters in ink i was originally doing things like wedding invitations and then one day a friend suggested that i approach some local cafes and restaurants about redoing their chalkboards going into restaurants and saying like hey can i redo that chalkboard and be like why because it's ugly and i can make it beautiful and maybe it'll help your business how much nothing okay knock yourself out so i'd do it and then i'd leave my business card and then it would rain and when it would rain i would get a phone call hey can you come back and do that chalkboard and that's what i would charge them i got some press and then word spread and i carved out a little niche for myself when i think about the projects that really stand out over the last 10 years the main one is this room that i completely covered in chalk for the kipps bay show house i worked on that project for about a week night and day and then it was open to the public and the question that everybody asked was can i touch it and we said absolutely touch it and see what happens there was this tension between the people in the room and the walls a lot of people didn't believe that it was real chalk they thought maybe it was chalk and that we had sprayed it with some kind of spray and i never do that if you if you spray chalk work you lose a lot of the powdery edges and we wanted it to be impermanent we wanted people to understand that you put it up and if you brush up against it it is gone so in my space i thought why don't i paint the walls and the ceiling of one space with chalkboard paint and then kind of go crazy i did that with the intention of changing it regularly and it has been up for eight years it has gotten um weathered over the years from people passing through i didn't anticipate what it would look like but i actually really like the remnants of architecture that has been worn down with time lots of bags and coats the kitchen was the only room up until recently that i didn't love in this apartment i decided it was time to make this kitchen a little jewel box make it everything that i have ever dreamed of in a kitchen and most of the stuff i was able to just do myself so the very first thing i started with was the wood paneling i wanted the kitchen to feel like an old pre-war tenement kitchen and it was really simple to just get this pine wainscoting nail it up and build up the moldings the baseboards and the chair rail i had a contractor come in and put in the crown molding that wasn't there either the other huge job that i did myself was i painted the cupboards and that was a lot of work i took all the doors off i took all the shelves out everything was painted with oil paint so it had to be primed and sanded and then painted two or three times the glass wasn't this glass it was just this frosted glass that was very modern looking and something i love about old buildings is when you can look at the windows and you see these wavy panels of glass that are hand blown when i was in high school and college i spent all my summers working as a costumed historical interpreter at a place called black creek pioneer village it's canada's equivalent to colonial williamsburg it wasn't just life-changing because i learned so many manual skills but being in that environment in buildings that were 200 years old utilitarian objects in these buildings were so beautiful there were irons with little like the handles were little swans heads and they didn't have to put a swan's head on that iron but they did that was the case with every single thing in these buildings useful things could be very beautiful that that really inspired me look at this sink look at this sink it is handmade in england by shaw's like everything that goes along with the whole dishwashing process now is fun because it's beautiful like this oh hello vintage munich tea towel that i got when i lived in germany oh hello hand blown soaked bottle with a little vintage spigot oh hello dishcloth that was hand woven by my friend deborah and then we have the dishes working at pioneer village i was introduced to old china and silverware so i started collecting iron stone china this is early american pressed glass at an antique store a glass like this would go for i don't know 30 bucks but you can find stuff like this if you know how to spot it you can find it at like junk stores so people come over and they've broken stuff before and they felt really bad and i'm like don't worry about it it's fine it's just two dollars if it breaks it's fine if the marble gets stained it already has some spots on it and i love them this is my silver not silver plate there's a big difference every fork every spoon in there averages about 100 bucks i collected piece by piece since i was a little kid like i'd get my birthday money and i'd go and buy a fork if you look very closely you can see we have the lion on passant which means that that was made in london and then we have the leopard's head which means that it was made in great britain and then we have the monarch's head and the monarch's head on this one is a young queen victoria so this was made under queen victoria's reign and then we have a letter and the letter is a q so let's go to our book there's queen victoria's head 1854. they didn't have electric lights in 1854 this was made by natural light or by oil lamp i'm obsessed these are my cutting boards which i made [Music] i make soap with goat's milk coconut oil and olive oil and then i put a little bit of frankincense and myrrh in it that's exclusively what i use in here i package it up too call it wise man soap the soap that jesus would have used sometimes when people talk about me they use that phrase butcher baker candlestick maker i haven't done any butchering another aspect of my time in the kitchen is cooking traditional tamil food so my parents are from sri lanka and i am tamil that is an ethnicity and a language for those who don't know and it is the best food in the world and there are some very specific tools that are required to make this food and the stuff is just so beautiful this is used for a kind of rice patty that's made with rice flour mixed with some boiling water you put the dough in here put the plunger in and then you squeeze out these vermicelli noodles onto these mats that are woven with strips of bamboo and then those little patties get steamed so it's another added aspect of the kitchen that i love it's this mix of new york tenement and sri lanka [Music] it's always been a dream to learn something on the piano and when the pandemic started i thought okay i am going to challenge myself to learn one chopin nocturne i just thought let's let's just take it bar by bar one bar that's all at the end of the year i can now sort of play one noctur [Music] it has been really fulfilling to sit down at the piano and to be able to play one of his pieces from beginning to land [Music] a lot of the stuff in here is actually from flea markets and thrift stores new york has great flea markets and great thrift stores people are coming and going and dying all the time and you can find great stuff that's really really affordable the coffee table in the living room was 25 bucks a nice sort of bronze frame but it didn't have any glass in it so i bought it and then i got some mirror from just a glass store and it was actually old mirror that they cut down to size i wanted to actually make it look antique so i distressed the mirror myself you take some nasty stuff called muriatic acid and you spray it on the back of the mirror and it starts to eat away at the silver so it happens really quickly you just sort of you have to time it and get it to the level where you want it if you leave it on for too long it'll take off all the silver here is a little project about my friend who's obsessed with his cat and i thought i should write a little kid's book and this is a little story about bernardo's cat agnes bernard is a hipster who lives in brooklyn and the cat gets angry sometimes when he leaves this is my landscape painting which is a copy of a painting from the 1850s by an irish painter george barrett i have always dreamed of painting landscapes and one of the ways artists have traditionally learned how to paint is actually by copying paintings copying paintings by the masters i printed this high-res image off the internet and zoomed in worked on this very slowly for the course of eight months it's oil paint so it had to be done in layers and the layers often would have to dry before i did the next layer but it was a big challenge that ended up working i love this thing [Music] this room is why i rented this apartment because of the wonderful light that streams in really for most of the day these lace curtains are pure cotton it is very very hard to find pure cotton lace today most mills that made this stuff are long gone so one of the few places left in the world where they still weave the old way is in lyon france and that's where this comes from lace curtains fluttering in the breeze look at look what's happening [Music] good boy yeah yeah [Music] i was walking down the street one day years ago and i saw a cab stop on the side of the road the door opened and this fluffy thing just jumped out and ran into a building where a doorman had opened the door for him i was like did i did i just imagine this so some very careful detective work revealed to me that prince lived down the street and i befriended his owners they offered to leave him here when they went out of town i was taking a painting class at the art students league and my teacher's mantra was paint what you see not what you know once when i was doggy sitting prince i thought let me try painting him and it and it turned out it turned out great i was really happy with the with the result i love that dog so much i apprentice with a wonderful potter in connecticut guy wolf makes all of martha stewart's flower pots he's been making flower pots for most of his life i read about him in martha's magazine and was determined to learn from him so i begged him to let me come and visit and the rest is history i've been going there for about 10 years now this pot was made by guy this beautiful pot was made by guy and this pot was made by me the bed is from the 1830s and it's actually a little shorter than a normal twin bed but then i found out that there's a mattress maker in the bronx charles h beckley they have been making mattresses horse hair mattresses by hand they came here measured the bed made this wonderful mattress it's really really comfortable look at this the corner is is hand finished so there are hand tied springs in here layers of horse hair and cotton great mattress well made made to last remember debra my weaver friend who made my towels in the kitchen she made this for me too i make a lot of things by hand so when i'm going out and buying something i want something that is well made i lived in germany for a year and a very good friend of mine was telling me that her grandmother had a saying we're too poor to buy cheap things i feel like my bike is my best friend it's from 1940 it was made in munich i brought it back with me it's built to last it's a solid steel frame it has a great belt art supplies take priority over clothes for me this is the bigger closet the canvases are up there this is full of beautiful wool um i'm always i always have a knitting project on the go this is a hat in progress all my books paper sketch pads oil paints during the pandemic i thought i would try my hand at book binding and i'm kind of hooked now i made this a few weeks ago it's a watercolor sketchbook you need to have proper watercolor paper in order to have the pages stay flat so that they don't buckle and curl let's talk clothes oh hello marie kondo so when i read marie condo's book that philosophy really spoke to me that the objects that you have in your life should be meaningful to you and should make you happy so i did it i condo'ed this place i got rid of anything that did not make me happy just the things that sparked joy there was a lot more when i was a little kid i watched the sound of music and i was like i want to dress like that but it didn't seem possible and then i started working at pioneer village and was wearing tweed in in my costume fulfilled that tweed need when i became an adult i commissioned some tweed suits to be made and then i really felt like these are my clothes this is my style debra wove this cloth this suit took about three years to make the sheep she picked two different sheep that were two shades of brown you can see the dark and the light those are the two different sheep it's lined with salmon colored silk i just love it i love the color combo the other thing that's in this closet that i wear in the winter i have four of them are these sweaters called gansey's they're fishermen sweaters there's something really sentimental about these fishermen sweaters they were a real working man's garment every village had their own pattern so i found a knitting collective in yorkshire where there's a group of women that still make gansey's the old way with real yorkshire wool and this is what came back knitted for me by marion brocklehurst who is 93 this year and she knits gansey's for daniel day-lewis it's like a hug the clothes in there they all have a story and they have meaning in them and every time i put on something that was handmade i'm thinking of the person that made it if someone told me there was a a shrine for marie condo i i would go and worship at the shrine and take flowers and bow that's how she got to me oh what have we wanted to wear today a nice gray t-shirt oh maybe a striped one let's look through our blues this space became a lot emptier after the whole marie condo thing but what it turned into was a kind of canvas a kind of nice blank canvas for bringing things in that don't stay forever come in they visit they add joy then they die and my mind feels a lot lighter [Music] thanks for watching and if you like this video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to handmade for more home tours just like this one

Channel: HGTV Handmade

Views: 1,650,808

Rating: 4.9710007 out of 5

Keywords: Home tours, antique home decor, antique decor, handmade home decor, vintage wall art, vintage decoration, vintage house tour, virtual house tour, vintage home accessories, handmade decorative items for wall, handmade decor, handmade wall decor, antique room decor, wall art, antique furniture, vintage furniture, diy home tour, hgtv, handmade

Id: 7Uo2nomf4I0

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/elkman22]

this is the coolest guy i have ever seen

[u/IntheBreezes]

This guy is on another level of talent and versatility

[u/Fooly]

I thought I’d share since it’s so rare to see creative and crafty desi representation! I’m blown away by how creative and handy Surendra is.

[u/Eros_eustress]

I absolutely adore him

[u/whatstheplanpakistan]

I saw this yesterday too! He is delightful. Why he doesn't have his own YouTube channel is beyond me.

[u/Dose-0f-Sarcasm]

From calligraphy to Tamil food, he does it all. He really is a G.

[u/rofosho]

Loved watching this

[u/dsarma]

I’d say he’s the quintessential renaissance man. Interested in so many things, and good at them after spending hours to get it right.

[u/hinduhammer_]

watched the whole thing, very cool