Maiwa’s Charllotte Kwon sees a rich future in the abandoned cash boxes, shipping containers, and factory floors of India.

When Charllotte Kwon bought a tiny apartment in the middle of Mumbai, the Canadian trader wanted to create a refuge from the chaos outside her door. As the owner of Maiwa Handprints Ltd., the Vancouver company that specializes in exquisite handcrafted, fair-trade textiles, Kwon leaves her peaceful home on the Sunshine Coast and travels to India several times a year to trade in fabrics and furniture for weeks, and even months, at a time. So she carefully painted the small suite that she used as a home away from home, lovingly hung simple lights and linen curtains, and for furniture used several of the beautifully time-worn teak cabinets that she ships home and sells at the Maiwa warehouse and furniture showroom off Clark Drive (1310 Odlum Drive) and in the Net Loft on Granville Island ( 604-669–3939, www.maiwa.com ).

"It looked so good," Kwon recounts. "And I would have people from the apartment complex over for tea, and they would say, 'Your place looks so nice. But it'll be so great when you can afford new furniture!'" The cabinets, she explains, are castoffs from offices and schools, and even though they are made from gorgeous solid teak and rosewood, they are often discarded as waste or burned as firewood. "So it's funny," she says. "They really don't like this stuff. And there will be a time when they do again–but unfortunately, it won't be there."

Fortunately, some of the pieces will be here. At the East Side warehouse, shopkeepers' cash boxes made of teak get new life as seats or storage ($169 to $249); carved wooden trunks, once used to ship indigo across oceans, become striking accessories ($299 to $499); boxes once charged with storing and transporting diamonds will likely be sold to hold more modest items ($299); ornately carved doors wait for a new entranceway halfway around the world ($699 to $5,000); and warm, glass-paned teak cabinets, used to store everything from saris to Indian foodstuffs, could go on to accommodate their western equivalents ($299 to $599).

"I'm interested in functional furniture–stuff that has been in homes and bakeries and businesses," says Kwon, standing next to a richly patinaed rosewood cabinet. "And it doesn't necessarily have a traditional Indian look as much as it has the look of lovely aging–something that shows that people sat around the table here, or that it's been in people's kitchens and ground on there. It's not fine furniture. But it's story furniture."

Kwon's own story is equally intriguing. She studied textile design in Vancouver more than 20 years ago, and developed a love for natural dying–a centuries-old art that has gone almost extinct–that eventually led her to India. Her initial interest in furniture, years later, was pragmatic: she needed cabinets to display her handmade fabrics. Now furnishings have become a significant part of her business.

Antique metal urns and a carved wood door from gujarat rest on a teak filing cabinet; above: From gujarat’s kutch desert, block-printed ajrakh bedding

Kwon could easily stay here and buy her stock from importers at trade shows, but she prefers to do most of the buying and selling for her business herself, and employs a year-round full-time staff in India to repair and refurbish the furniture items–in exchange for a third of their retail sales price. (Fair wages and treatment for her employees are cornerstones of her business model.) For Kwon, the human connection to the pieces, and the experience of buying them, is a big part of their allure.

"Everything we sell, whether it's furniture or bedding or clothing, evokes a curiosity in whoever picks it up," she says. "As any handcrafted piece should, it makes you ask, 'Who made this?' And I am very proud of the fact that we can say, 'We know them,'" says Kwon, who has just returned from a six-week trip to India, where she travelled more than 6,000 kilometres with her son and daughter buying the furniture that will arrive in Vancouver during the next 12 months. "We have even had furniture arrive to us on camel carts, and after it got unloaded, we had tea with the camel driver," she remembers. "Then all of these people repair and polish it, it gets put in a container, shipped on a freighter, and it's here."

But not all of Maiwa's furniture is purchased as complete pieces. Refusing to buy new wood, Kwon has salvaged teak from old ships, and even bought an entire textile factory that was slated for demolition so that the Burmese teak floors, walls, and ceiling could find new life as cabinets, chairs, and tables to be sold at her Vancouver stores. (Prices run from $129 for a chair to $899 for a bed or large cabinet.)

"I literally had it dismantled and trucked to Jodhpur because it's nice and dry," says Kwon, running her hand along a rustic wood table made from a piece of the factory wall. Just a metre away are beautifully sculpted beds made from the same source. In Jodhpur, workers create design and build pieces that are aesthetically similar to the older finds, using every possible piece of timber and leaving absolutely nothing–not even old nails–to waste. "I bought it about seven years ago, and we've made a lot of furniture with it. So I asked one of the guys when he thinks we're going to run out, and he said, 'You know, Charllotte, the way you make furniture, we'll run out in about 200 years,'" she says with a laugh. "But I couldn't be in furniture otherwise. Almost nobody is really successfully planting trees, and there is so much old wood. There is no need to cut a

There are, however, many challenges to working with reclaimed wood. First, the builders don't get to use long, uniform boards when they're cutting pieces for chair backs, so mass production is difficult. The age of the wood means any joinery needs special care and attention, and while wood filler could be used to fix gashes and flaws, Kwon says she has all but banned it from the refurbishing process, because while it can mask structural problems, it cannot fix them.

Reclaimed teak and seasum wood await a second life.

Kwon–who also has a charitable foundation that pays for small-scale projects in the areas where her company operates–would have a much heftier profit if cut corners, worked with cheap new wood, and paid her Indian labourers the going rate for their work. But that's worlds away from her modus operandi.

"With the capitalist idea of getting the most for the least, we have ground wages down and we are consuming more," Kwon says. "We're getting a $10 pair of jeans at the expense of somebody, somewhere working seven days a week and not being able to fill the caloric intake of their families. That's out of whack.

"So for me, unless I can actually use my position as a buyer, as a retailer, as an employer, as a trader, and as a consumer and make a really significant difference, then it's not worth it. I might as well not be in it anymore. But handcraft doesn't have to be a charitable activity. I feel good about the fact that this kind of retail can survive. And it really can survive."