THERE’S something fascinating about exploring unique artefacts and quaint finds. Imagine finding a 20 x 30 feet carpet, that was made around the 1890s, handwoven by jail inmates from Agra. There’s this and more at RugWeave, an exclusive store for handmade rugs, dhurries and kilims sourced from around the world , opened earlier this year in January, in Nungambakkam.
In the family
Run by third generation entrepreneurs Meherunissa Tariq, 28 and her brother Zeeshan Tariq, RugWeave doesn’t just have exquisite and vintage rug collections but also supports over 600 weavers, by providing them looms at their own homes. While the parent company MS Art s on TTK Road, was started 30 years ago by her father SM Tariq, the rug business has always been a family affair. “For my brother and me, it means a lot to be able to do something that has been in the family for three generations,” says Meherunissa who previously worked in an advertising agency. “It started with my grandfather who was in Srinagar who used to make pashmina shawls and rugs,and take them over to Baluchistan and Afghanistan and then trade them for Afghani and Iranian rugs.” Meherunissa’s first tryst with carpets was on her travel to Kashmir in 2013, along with her brother that she met Gulam Mohiuddin, one of the finest weavers in the area. Here, she learnt the anatomy of a rug and how the art was dying due to lack of resources.
Around the world
At RugWeave, you can choose from a variety of over 700 pieces ranging from modern rugs to a Persian-Iranian collection. Their Gabbeh Dissolve range from the Contemporary collection is a fusion of bamboo silk and jute which are otherwise not used in the making of traditional rugs with old aesthetic styles. “Gabbeh is a Persian design concept that uses lots of solid colour with other colours sprinkled across,” explains Meherunissa. Their tribal collection is a wool-on-wool tribal rug range from Balochistan, Qashqai, Afshar, Samarkand and Afghanistan.
These are woven with handspun wool and coloured with natural dyes. If you love silk and the sheer richness, then the Kashmiri collection is your best bet. “These are finely woven silk-on-silk rugs, that have a knot density of 256 per square inch to 3,600 per square inch which means — higher the knot density, the more the exclusivity of the rug, as the man hours and finesse of it increases as well,” explains Meherunnisa. Most of their weavers are in Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh, while rugs are sourced from Iran, Afghanistan and Central India. She hopes to, by the end the year, start a separate funding wing for their team of weavers.
On the money
The most expensive carpet made by their weavers is a Kashmiri silk rug in 2017, that has 3600 knots per sq inch and is one of the highest knotted rugs in the world. It costs `40 lakh and has taken the better part of five years to make. The most expensive carpet they have collected is an antique Iranian rug that is over 2 00 years old , valued at approximately `40 lakh.
Starts at `1,200 up to `20,000