“On Clouds, Craft, and Creating Cumulus”

"Designing in a State of Becoming"
By Khushali Chawda

There’s something about clouds that has always stayed with me, about creating Castels in the Clouds, about dreaming.

Not just the way they move — weightless yet grounded, constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming. But the way they hold opposites. Presence and absence. Light and shadow. Solidity and impermanence.

That quiet duality is where Cumulus was born.
Not as a design studio.
Not as a brand.
But as a way of seeing.

As Rabindranath Tagore once wrote,
"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky."

And isn’t that what we all need? Especially now, in a world caught between uncertainty and hope — to look up at the sky and believe in something softer. Something kinder. Something timeless.

Clouds remind us: nothing stays. And yet, everything connects.
The skies stretch over us — quiet and vast — holding stories from every corner of the earth.
They are reminders to pause, breathe, and dream.

This is what I hold close when I create.
Not forms or functions.
But the permission to feel.
To wonder.
To drift — like a thought unspoken, or a daydream half-remembered.

They call it the Daydreamer's Science — the quiet art of observing clouds.
It invites us to build castles in the sky, the way we did as children.
To revisit that tender place where imagination lived without boundaries, where the world was still ours to invent.

Cumulus is an extension of that world.
A way to hold onto transience.
To honour contrast.
To design not as a declaration, but as an offering.

We’re not here to shout.
We’re here to whisper.

In textures that echo time.
In silhouettes that suggest stillness.
In forms that ask you to look again — and feel something you didn’t expect.

This is Cumulus Thinking:
Not a style.
A slowness.
A sensing.
A belief that every shadow has a story.
And that light — like wonder — is something we shape together.

As G.K. Chesterton said,
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

So take this moment.
Look up.
Let your thoughts drift.
Let the sky soften the sharp edges of the day.
And if you see a castle floating there, know this: you’re not alone.

We’re all dreaming, quietly, in the same sky.

— Khushali