The bespoke luxury trend is everywhere right now. Custom homes, furniture, everything. We have been doing custom rugs for 20 years. My grand father and father foresaw long before the market caught up that in a world where everything is available everywhere, owning something that only you have would become the most important luxury of […]
India has produced some of the most extraordinarily skilled craftsmen in the world. The weaver who has spent 30 years on the same loom and whose hands know things that cannot be written down. The dyer who can look at a colour batch and tell you in seconds whether the tone is right. The designer, […]
One decision has shaped everything about how we work. We have never outsourced our dyeing. And because of that we have spent decades building something that I think is genuinely unique to us. A colour library of thousands of shades all developed in-house, all logged precisely. Every recipe written down to a fraction of a […]
One of the best decisions we ever made was paying our weavers more than the industry standard. It costs us more on every single project.And I would make the same decision again without hesitation. Here is why.The rugs we make are not easy to weave. They have intricate designs, complex colours, high knot counts that […]
Every rug starts with an inspiration. Sometimes it’s a colour palette we have in our heads and we work backwards to find designs that belong inside it. Sometimes it’s a texture we want to explore. Sometimes we walk through a museum and something stops us and we think, we can work with this. We have […]
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 […]
