Meet the Freedom Tree Man:Varun Deshpande in Sands
Inside his world of ideas, travel, good design and a life lived his way.
@freedomtreehome
September 2026
Bella is asleep on the floor and has no intention of moving.
A bright-eyed black Lab, every bit as friendly as she’s hungry, these days she keeps to the cool part of the room and lets the day come to her.
Varun is at the table with a book. A wall of painted faces above him. Around him, a room that was clearly never decided all at once — art, objects, furniture that arrived one piece at a time and stayed. None of it looks styled, because none of it was. It arrived slowly. Each thing carrying something with it. The room is just where all of it settled.
Gentle, unhurried, a real listener, which is rarer than it sounds. Yet when he’s with close friends, he becomes the most articulate person in the room. Comfortably the most talkative, too.
TVarun Deshpande has spent his career asking the same question at a larger and larger scale. He trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer at Carnegie Mellon, and began in healthcare technology across the US and India. This early work saw the body as a system to be repaired.
At the Good Food Institute, he worked on plant-based meat alternatives, and on the supply chains behind it. How a country feeds itself is one of the largest carbon levers it has. Also one of the least examined.
Now he runs the Institute for Climate Innovation. A broader platform, with the same instinct. He puts it more plainly than we would: “building sustainable abundance for the global majority.
GQ has counted him among the country's most influential young Indians. He is as likely to be speaking at an IIT as at Harvard. He doesn't romanticize how he got there, either.
"Waiting for an epiphany is just a waste of time. You go headfirst into the problem and find out.”
A Shared Sensibility
TThe same instinct turns up in smaller places. He travels constantly and greets every dog along the way. He goes through phases with whatever the fitness world is insisting on this year, and takes them seriously right up until he doesn't. You'll find him in something printed and joyful, or in the gym sweats he never got around to changing out of, and he is equally himself in both. Which is why the clothes worked.
He put on the Shifting Sands coord the way we'd hoped someone eventually would — as a shirt, then as a set, then as something he'd forgotten he had on. Pure cotton dobby, cut easy through the shoulder and through the leg, so it moves when he does and settles when he doesn't. The print behaves like a horizon: expansive, unhurried, entirely unbothered by a room already full of art.
Later, by the window, the Temple Palm camp shirt and shorts came out and the whole day seemed to change pace. That's the real test. Not how a piece photographs on a rail, but whether it can carry a man from a book and a cup of coffee through a long lunch and into whatever the evening becomes — without ever asking to be thought about again.
Personal style begins long before you get dressed.
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