Craftsmanship meets sustainbility: One-of-a-kind rugs that anchor modern spaces

The almond-coloured walls of HōmAnAn were lined with bespoke artefacts, sculptural furniture, and quiet details that revealed themselves slowly. It was within this immersive setting that The First Layer, a collaboration between HōmAnAn and Understorey, unfolded. The two-day exhibition reimagined the rug not as an accessory, but as the emotional and visual foundation of a home.
A rug is often the first thing a room learns to hold — footsteps, light, silence, conversation. Before furniture settles in and before objects begin to collect meaning, there is texture underfoot, shaping how a space feels.

Curated by Rahul Kapoor and Anubha Aneja, the exhibition featured one-of-a-kind rugs crafted from repurposed dyed yarn sourced from active looms. Instead of beginning with fixed sketches or rigid colour maps, the process allows colours, textures, and irregularities to evolve organically. Each rug emerges intuitively through the act of weaving itself, making every piece impossible to replicate.

Alongside these experimental works, Understorey also presented its signature handcrafted rugs woven by master artisans in Jaipur, reflecting the atelier’s legacy dating back to 1916. Rather than treating leftover yarn as excess, the exhibition reframes it as material with memory. Existing fibres are reworked through new dyeing techniques and layered compositions, creating rugs that feel at once contemporary and deeply rooted in traditional weaving practices.

“We treat our carpets as art on the floor,” says Rahul Kapoor, co-founder of Understorey, as he spoke about the collaboration. “As we worked with repurposed yarns from active looms, we realised we would never get the same look twice, and that became the most special element of this collection. That is how the concept evolved — each rug is truly one of a kind. People dedicate months of their lives to producing a single carpet completely by hand. It is among the most time-intensive pieces one can bring into a home, and it carries a very powerful presence through its raw materials, colours, and design language.”

For Anubha Aneja, the exhibition was equally about how people experience spaces. “A home is never a sum of individual pieces,” she says. “It is built through relationships — between objects, materials, and the people who live with them. The showhouse is Anubha's former residence and now houses over 40 homegrown brands.

As visitors moved through the showhouse, the rugs appeared and reappeared across different settings, and for those intriqued by the time-intensive craft of hand knotting the carpets, artisans showcased the weaving process on the loom.