In 2026 the most searched term in luxury interiors is vintage.

Buyers are walking past new collections and reaching for pieces that are 40, 60, 80 years old. Interior designers who spent the last decade specifying clean, contemporary, machine-perfect rooms are now sourcing antique rugs as the first thing they put in a space.

Something has shifted. And I think I know what it is.
People want objects that last.
Objects that carry evidence of time. That improve with use rather than surrendering to it. That carry meaning rather than fill space.

A vintage rug stops you because it has earned its character.
The way the colour has mellowed. The way the pile has settled. The specific quality of warmth that only comes from wool that has been lived on for decades.

That character cannot be manufactured. It accumulates slowly. Over years of correct making followed by years of careful use.

Here is the fact that explains everything.
Every antique rug in existence is natural fibre.

There is no such thing as a 100-year-old synthetic rug because none of them survived long enough to become antiques.

The buyers reaching for vintage pieces are reaching for permanence.

For objects that improve rather than decline. That carry meaning rather than fill space. That can be handed forward rather than disposed of.

A new hand-knotted rug made correctly today is a future antique.

The wool sourced for its lanolin content. The dyes chosen for how they mellow over thirty years. The knot density that determines whether the pile holds its character across decades of use.

These decisions made now, in the dye room and at the loom determine whether a rug becomes something someone’s grandchild inherits or something that goes to landfill in three years.

Understorey

A friend of mine called me a few years ago.

He owns horse stables in Pune. He used to play polo. Has spent his life around horses.

He wanted a rug of his horse.

A portrait.The exact horse made entirely by hand in wool.

I said yes immediately.

What followed was one of the most exciting projects we took on.

Fifteen to twenty colours to get the depth right. The shadow. The way light catches the coat. Every shade mixed in our dye lab to a precise recipe. Every colour tested against every other to make sure nothing looked wrong.

And then months on the loom.

A weaver carrying the entire image in his hands across hundreds of working days. Making thousands of decisions daily that determine whether the finished piece looks alive or just looks like a rug.

When it was done it did not look like a carpet.

It looked like it could only belong to one person.

We have done dogs. Big cats. An entire Animal Kingdom collection that started one commission at a time. Each one for someone who wanted something that could not exist anywhere else in the world.

A client in Texas lost his dog and gave us a photograph. That photograph became a rug.

This is what I find most meaningful about this work.

Most of what we make is beautiful. Some of what we make is extraordinary.

But occasionally we make something that is completely irreplaceable to one specific person.

That is the work I am most proud of.

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 all.

So we built the infrastructure for it.

We have full dedicated teams for custom projects. The ability to handle any size, any colour, any design, any shape a client can imagine. Twenty years of bespoke commissions that have built us into a company that can execute at the highest level for the most discerning clients without hesitation.

The proof of concept is 20 years of work.

And what I see now especially in India is exactly what my father anticipated.

The well-travelled Indian buyer. The person who has seen the finest homes in the world. They do not want what everyone else has.

They want something that is completely theirs.

We have been building toward that customer for two decades.

It feels good to see them arrive.

Understorey

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, the carder, the spinner, the washer and the finisher each one a master in his craft working in perfect symphony to create something unique.

Every person in this craft plays a specific role. And when it all comes together – when the wool, the colour, the design, and the weaving align, what emerges is something genuinely extraordinary.

I work with these people every day and I am genuinely in awe of them.

To every craftsman and woman who puts their hands and their knowledge into what we make –

Thank you.

What you do is extraordinary.

And the world is a more beautiful place because of it.

Happy Independence Day 🇮🇳

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 gram. Every shade tested across the raw materials we work with. Because the same colour behaves differently on Handspun wool than it does on hand-spun silk. What sits beautifully on one fibre can look completely different on another.

Our library accounts for all of that.

It has been built over years of understanding exactly how each colour we create interacts with each material we use. That knowledge comes from doing this every single day for a very long time.

We sent our own colour reference boxes to every design house we work with.

When they need a specific colour for a project they open our box, pick a reference and give us the code.

We dye it. Same result every time.

I always think of it like a Michelin star restaurant.

You go back for the dish you loved and it tastes exactly the same as the first time.

That consistency is the hardest thing to achieve. And the only way it happens is when the recipe is followed precisely, every single time, by people who have been doing it long enough to know when something is even slightly off.

That is what this colour library gives us.

And it exists because a long time ago we decided to never let colour leave our hands.

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 very few craftsmen in this industry can produce correctly.

You cannot make what we make without the best weavers.
And you cannot keep the best weavers if the economics do not work for them.
I have watched weavers leave this craft my whole life.

When the profession stops paying well enough, they move on. Their children choose something else. The knowledge that took a lifetime to build disappears quietly with them.

My family has been working with the same weavers for generations.
These are not people we hire for a project.

So beyond wages we try to keep them working through everything – slow periods, market disruptions, difficult years.
We help with bank accounts. Children’s education. Medical needs when they arise.
Nothing formal about it. Just the way we have always worked.

I say it because I genuinely believe if you want this craft to survive another generation, you have to make it worth choosing.

Understorey

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 over 20 designers working with us. Each one has their own strengths. Some are exceptional with traditional art forms. Some with modern directions. Some just understand how colours need to sit next to each other.

We sit together and put a concept on the table. We bounce ideas, make trial CADs. Change the palette. Go again.
It is completely free flowing. No restrictions. You can do anything you think of.

That freedom is what makes this the most exciting part of the whole process.
We have a library of over 20,000 designs.

Most of them have never been produced.
Because we keep creating faster than we can make.

Understorey

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 rear the sheep. They sell us the yarn.

But the money was not reaching the women or the children.
The village Sarpanch and the women came to us directly.
We thought about what we could do.
And we made one decision.

We moved from machine carding to hand carding and we gave those jobs to the women.

Carding is the process of sorting raw wool before it goes for spinning. Removing impurities. Separating fibres. Machines had always done this.
But machines break the natural fibres in the process.

When the women started hand carding by hand something we did not expect happened. The yarn became more beautiful.

The natural character of wool – its texture, its softness, its capacity for abrash came through in a way that machine carding had always suppressed.

We set up over a hundred bank accounts directly in the women’s names.
Payments went to them.

We helped them understand how to allocate money for their children’s education, for their own needs, independent of anyone else.

What started as the right thing to do became one of the best decisions we ever made for the quality of what we produce.

Today 90 to 95 percent of our production uses hand-carded wool.

Understorey

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 intact. The movement and the soul of a motif that has survived for hundreds of years because it was beautiful to begin with.

Then we ask one question.
How would it look in today’s colours or today’s textures.

A Mughal medallion in warm ivory and caramel.
A Persian border in muted sage and soft terracotta.
A traditional pattern carrying its geometry but breathing in today’s palette and texture.

The design is old.
The feeling is completely of this moment.

That tension between something ancient and something immediate is what makes transitionals unlike anything else in a room.

History can never be manufactured.
We can only carry it forward.

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 it enhances that nature.

Pot dyeing is the technique we use in our facility which is done by hand, in the same way it has been done for centuries, with better equipment today but the same fundamental process.

When yarn goes into a pot by hand, it absorbs colour with natural variation. The movement of the dye in the pot. The way the yarn sits. The specific moment it comes out.

Mechanical processes take away from that nature. The natural state is lost and so does its elegance.

The abrash in a hand-knotted rug is the fingerprints of the yarn and the dyeing process.
And it is one of the reasons a correctly dyed rug looks alive in a room.

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 do not biodegrade.

Natural wool rugs last generations.
The structure holds. The lanolin in the wool distributes through the pile over years of use. The colour deepens rather than fades. The rug responds to being lived on rather than surrendering to it.

COVER Magazine reported last week that by 2025 synthetic performance fibres have become the majority in the global luxury rug industry.

And simultaneously the IWTO confirmed that 100% wool meets identical commercial durability standards to wool-nylon blends.
Wool does not need synthetic reinforcement. It never did.

The performance argument for synthetic is not about durability.
It is about margin and scalability. And the fact that most buyers cannot tell the difference at the point of purchase.
They find out three years later, when the pile starts to go.

The most expensive rug in your home is the one you keep replacing.

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 colour right, you have done 70% of your job.
A colour recipe in our lab can come down to one-tenth of a gram. One-fifth of a gram. That difference is the difference between a grey that sits right and a grey that pulls towards purple or green. Between a brown that warms a room and one that deadens it.

We think about it every single day.
Our dyeing facility has 75 workers. Three head chemists who have been with us for 20 to 30 years. Three in-house labs where we create new colour recipes from scratch – multiple shades every single day.

And we have done this entirely in-house for decades because when colour is the most important thing, we don’t settle for anything but the right shade.