Folded into quarters and laid in tissue, a silk carré keeps far more than its dimensions suggest. Within each square lives an artist’s hand, a year of issue, a market stall or boutique, and the private reason it was chosen, yet those details begin to fade the moment the drawer closes. For collectors of Hermès, whose scarves are prized as much for their artistry as their craftsmanship, that slow erasure is a loss worth preventing.

Tina Dhillon knows that loss intimately. An architect and interior designer, she has spent decades considering how people live with the things they keep, and she decided the problem deserved a solution.

As principal of Studio DO {Dhillon+Others} Architecture + Interiors, the boutique atelier she has led since 2018, Dhillon designs new builds, renovations, and downsized homes guided by a philosophy she calls Bold Simplicity: begin with restraint, then allow one element to command the room. In her own wardrobe, that element has long been the silk scarf. Her collection, rich with Hermès carrés, once lived in boxes, and retrieving a single piece felt like an excavation. “Out of sight, out of mind,” she admits. The problem sharpened in vintage markets, where she would find herself holding a scarf she adored and wondering whether its twin was already at home. Her consistent pull toward certain colours, patterns, and themes, the very quality that defines a distinctive style voice, made it surprisingly easy to lose track.

“I kept thinking, there has to be a better way,” Dhillon recalls. Nothing she tried could hold both the object and the memory attached to it.

She approached the gap the way she approaches a floor plan, considering proportion, display, and the relationship between an object and its owner. “So I built something I needed,” she explains. The result is Club Les Carrés app, a digital gallery for collectors that launched this fall. Users can photograph a scarf and add it in moments, or document each piece in exhaustive detail. Scarves can be marked as owned, previously owned, or wish-listed. A growing Treasury already holds information on more than 900 designs, while printable Collector Cards carry the experience back into the physical world.

Dhillon’s affinity for textiles began in India, where, as a young girl, she sat in sari shops as merchants unfurled silk after silk for her mother. The afternoons bored her at the time, yet the lessons stayed.

She still keeps some of her mother’s saris and dupattas, and she credits those early hours with shaping the Bold Simplicity that now guides her work. Several pieces in her collection trace back to moments of travel and heritage. After visiting the Palais Garnier in Paris with her husband, also an architect, she found an Hermès scarf depicting the opera house in a vintage market in Rome. Another favourite, Hermès’ Beloved India, has grown more meaningful with every year she has owned it.

Those stories set the tone for the launch of Club Les Carrés, which drew collectors from across California and as far as Palm Beach, Florida. Designers, creatives, and scarf enthusiasts arrived with silk knotted at the neck or draped over a shoulder, and conversation drifted easily from the scarves themselves to the journeys, gifts, and discoveries behind each piece.

“I wanted Club Les Carrés to inspire that little moment of curiosity,” Dhillon shared after the launch. “To look more closely at something we already own and discover the art, history and story behind it.”

Moving from architecture into technology may surprise some, but Dhillon regards it as a natural extension of her practice. As she puts it, “I believe that the most meaningful spaces — and lives — are not designed from trends, but from a clear understanding of who we are.” For a designer accustomed to shaping rooms, the silk square offered a new kind of space to furnish. Club Les Carrés now gives collectors far beyond Vancouver a place to hold their scarves, and the stories folded inside them, with the same care that defines her work at Studio DO.