Fifteen years ago a group of women from a small village near Bikaner came to us with a problem.We listened. And it changed how we make our rugs. We source our primary wool from – a 13-village region near Bikaner where some of the finest wool in India comes from. The men in those villages […]
There is a word we use at Understorey with our designing team Transitionals. No industry definition. It describes something at the heart of how we design at times.We take traditional motifs – Mughal patterns centuries old, Persian designs, Turkish art forms, Aztec geometry and we reimagine them. The essence of the original design stays completely […]
There is a word in the rug world.Abrash. It is the slight tonal variation you see in a hand-knotted rug, where one section of a colour is fractionally different from the section beside it. A warmth that shifts. A depth that moves. It happens because of the nature of the yarn. When we dye by hand […]
Antique rugs are hundreds of years old. Every single one of them is natural fibre. Synthetic fibre rugs on the other hand last 3 to 5 years on average. The cheaper ones last one. The pile breaks down. The colour fades unevenly. Then it goes into landfill, where it sits for decades because synthetic fibres […]
Dyeing is one of, if not the most important part of making a rug. Here is why.When someone walks into a room and sees a rug – the very first thing their eye reacts to is colour, not the design or the texture.Colour.Design is secondary. Texture comes only after they touch it. If you get […]
The best moment at The First Layer was the loom. We set up a small loom at HōmAnAn and let a weaver from Jaipur work through the show exactly as he would in our workshop. Interior designers, architects, art curators – people who have spent their careers working with beautiful things walked into that room […]
Everyone wants to own something nobody else has.At the The First Layer show in Delhi I saw that up close. The moment people understood what One of a Kind rugs actually means that this specific rug exists once and can never be made again, something changed in them. I had to tell a few people […]
What happens when two people who care deeply about the same things decide to work together? The First Layer. Me and Anubha sat down after the show to talk about what brought Understorey and HōmAnAn together and what came out of it. Why the collaboration made sense. What the show felt like from the inside. […]
I think of my father in many ways. For a large part of my life, he was a protector. At work, I grew up watching him do extraordinary things. His instinct for colour, design, texture I still don’t fully understand it. In 2011, I took a trip with him to Hannover, Germany for the Domotex […]
I will be honest about what today feels like.Proud. Proud of the Master weavers who made every piece at HōmAnAn. And grateful to Anubha for building a space worthy of it. The First Layer is open at HōmAnAn, Greater Kailash II, Delhi. Today and tomorrow. 11am to 5pm. This is a moment I have been […]
