Karun Thakar x National Trust: Three Houses, One Journey
Karun Thakar remembers the moment the idea took shape. He was visiting Osterley Park on a summer afternoon when a Sikh wedding party gathered on the steps, many of them stepping inside the grand Robert Adam interiors for the first time. Watching them, something clicked. These walls, hung with portraits of the Child family and gilded with the proceeds of East India Company shareholdings, had never held space for the textiles those visitors might recognise from their own family weddings. Thakar wanted to change that.
Karun Thakar and long Asafo flag on the Best Staircase at Dyrham Park. Photo: James Dobson
That idea has now become a reality. Journeys, a new partnership between Thakar and the National Trust, brings highlights from his global textile collection to three historic properties: Osterley Park in Isleworth, Blickling Estate in Norfolk, and Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire. Each house gets its own exhibition, shaped by its own history, but the thread running through all three is the same: textiles as carriers of memory, migration, and the uncomfortable global stories that grand houses often leave unsaid.
A chand (moon) bagh on display in the Etruscan Room at Osterley. Photo: Megan Taylor
At Osterley, more than seventy baghs and phulkaris will fill the neoclassical rooms with embroidery from undivided Punjab. The words themselves tell part of the story: bagh means garden, phulkari means flower work, and both describe wedding shawls traditionally stitched by young women in preparation for marriage. They are draped on mannequins and arranged to follow the stages of a wedding itself, bringing colour and craft into rooms designed to impress rather than to celebrate.
Fragment from Karun Thakar's aunt. 42cm x 61cm (c) Karun Thakar Collection, Photo: Desmond Brambley
Among them sits one small, devastating fragment: a cotton bagh embroidered with red silk flowers, used by Thakar's great-aunt Banarso to smuggle her jewellery as she fled Lahore for Vrindavan during Partition in 1947. A piece of cloth made for celebration, repurposed for survival.
Five African Ewe and Ashanti cloths in the Long Gallery at Blickling. Photo: Claire Naylor
Blickling takes a different route, becoming a meeting point for textiles from across the world. Japanese kimonos, French toiles, Italian embroideries, Turkoman coats, and Kente cloth from Ghana will sit alongside domestic Punjabi kanthas, brought into rooms historically reserved for male portraiture. The house's own links to global trade, India, and empire give these objects an unusually direct conversation partner, and rare books from Blickling's library, including a complete set of Hiroshige's Views of Mount Fuji, will be shown alongside the cloth.
Asafo flag, Ghana, early 20th century, 342 x 117cm (c) Karun Thakar Collection. Photo: Desmond Brambley.
Then there's Dyrham, where more than thirty Asafo flags from Ghana's Fante people will fill a house built on colonial wealth. These flags, blending European naval imagery with local symbolism, span centuries, from early examples bearing the British Union flag through to riotously coloured post-independence works by master artist Kobina Badowah.
Karun Thakar adjusts a bagh in the Tapestry Room at Osterley. Photo: Megan Taylor
What makes Journeys worth travelling for is its refusal to treat these objects as decoration or curiosity. Thakar describes textiles as things that absorb our imprints, literal and historical, and this collection insists on being read that way: as evidence that the global and the domestic have always been entwined.
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Further Information:
Journeys is open now at Osterley Park, Blickling Estate, and Dyrham Park and runs until 1 November 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Asafo flag from Karun Thakar Collection on display in Dyrham house 2026. Photo: Desmond Brambley.
All further images as credited in captions.