No American embraced South Asian woodwork more than Lockwood de Forest. Born in 1850, de Forest was from a prominent New York family, which brought him into the orbits of such nineteenth-century cultural luminaries as Frederic Church. It was at Church’s Olana that de Forest browsed the books that inspired his love of exotic ornament. On his two-year honeymoon he became fascinated by the elaborate woodwork in Indian architecture. This vision fit perfectly into the American Aesthetic–movement style of exotic, complex patterns, rich colors, and handwork. Seeing an opportunity to make the wood components for both his projects and a broader market, he and a local partner established the Ahmadabad Woodcarving Company. A display of the company’s work at the World’s Columbian Exposition proved popular. Commissions in New York included interiors in Andrew Carnegie’s mansion on Fifth Avenue (now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum) and a townhouse for his parents in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

As part of Associated Artists, a collaborative design group that included Louis Comfort Tiffany, Samuel Coleman, Stanford White, and Candace Wheeler, de Forest contributed to public rooms at the famed Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where the elaborate carved woodwork is a frame for the equally exotic metalwork, glass, and ceramics. For these artists, architects, and designers, Islamic geometric patterns, vegetal patterns, and even calligraphy offered an alternate language to classical artistic and architectural principles, an enriching layer that was an essential part of a truly American style. While a