In Mumbai, size matters. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growing number of retail spaces catering to the booming luxury home market. Jaipur Rugs is the latest entrant, with a newly opened 20,000-square-foot flagship in a Victorian-era warehouse within Empire Mills, one of the many former textile mills dotting Lower Parel. The company, which has single-handedly made carpets cool with ad campaigns featuring elaborate rugs strewn across everything from ski slopes to tennis courts, calls the new space as much a gallery as a store.

The turnout on a Friday evening was buzzy, with much of Mumbai in attendance. Pavitra Rajaram, creative director of Nilaaya Anthology, described the store as “part souk and part international gallery. Bombay needed this desperately. There was no space selling carpets exclusively that offers this kind of range.” Attendee Niki Gomez, a functional medicine health coach, joked: “It’s a great showcase of their different styles and approaches, but I wish they’d included a tennis court as in their campaign, since they have the space for it.”

Changing landscape

“Luxury retail is changing,” said Yogesh Chaudhary, managing director of Jaipur Rugs. “Customers are no longer looking only for a beautiful product; they are looking for meaning, provenance and an experience that stays with them. We wanted to create a space where the product, the artisan and the story behind the craft are equally important.”

Pallavi Dean

Designed by ROAR, the Dubai-based multidisciplinary studio led by Pallavi Dean, the cavernous interior marries the building’s industrial bones with contemporary installations. “The building already had a powerful identity — the steel structure, the pitched roof, the clerestory light and the memory of its textile past,” Dean explained. “We looked at weaving as a system of repetition, rhythm and connection, and translated those ideas into the architecture through fractal geometry and a series of sculptural volumes.”

Other various artworks

Alongside the thousands of carpets are artworks: framed embroidery on silk by Lalita Vakil, a Padma Shri awardee, and miniature paintings in natural pigment by Riyazuddin. Also on display are the acclaimed Manchaha and Freedom Manchaha collections, for which artisans were given a free hand to design carpets drawn entirely from their own imagination, a reversal of the usual hierarchy between designer and maker.

Jaipur Rugs at Homo Faber

The company, which was founded in 1978 by Yogesh’s father, Nand Kishore Chaudhary, started with two looms and today has more than 7,000, selling across 90 countries, with stores in London, Milan, Dubai and Singapore. It works with 40,000 artisans, 90% of whom are women. The brand recently collaborated with PUMA sneakers; the sports brand used artisanal carpet dyes for their shoes, while Jaipur Rugs weavers stitched intricately woven patterns of the PUMA logo into handcrafted rugs. The company is also participating in Homo Faber, the craft biennale in Venice, where its rugs are on display. 

“I really want Jaipur Rugs to feel like it’s at the centre of contemporary culture,” said Greg Foster, Jaipur Rugs’ artistic director. “From art and fashion to music and dance, it’s about making the connect between the outstanding craftsmanship of our artisans with the finest creative talents.”

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist and author.