Our story
Seven hundred kilometres of worn grey rock from the edge of Delhi to the plains of Gujarat. Everything we sell was made in a town along it.
The Aravallis were folded up out of the crust somewhere around two and a half billion years ago, before there was anything alive on land to watch it happen. They have been wearing down ever since. In most places what is left is a low grey spine, quartzite and schist and old granite, rarely more than a few hundred metres above the plain.
The Himalayas are young and still rising. The Aravallis finished rising a very long time ago and simply stayed. That is the part we keep coming back to. Not scale, not drama. Persistence.
The range also does work. It stands between the Thar desert and the rest of India and holds the sand back. It catches what rain arrives and sends it down into the tanks and step wells that let towns exist in a dry country. Everything else here follows from that.
Where we buy
Geology decided where the water was. Water decided where the dyers went. The crafts of Rajasthan are, read one way, a list of things the range made available: stone, mineral pigment, clay from the tank beds, and water soft enough to ferment indigo in.
What we carry
We buy narrow on purpose. Three crafts, learned properly, from workshops we can keep going back to. A wider range would mean buying through agents, and then we could not tell you who made it.
Jaipur blue pottery
Jaipur blue pottery is made without clay. Ground quartz, glass and fuller's earth are kneaded into a dough, pressed into moulds, painted by hand in cobalt and copper oxides and fired once at a low heat. The craft came to Jaipur by way of Persia and the Mughal court, and the city has made it for a century and a half.
See the piecesCarved and inlaid marble
Makrana marble comes out of the hills north west of Jaipur, the stone the Taj Mahal was built from. In the workshops of Jaipur it is turned into tea light holders, trays and bowls by hand: carved, pierced into jali, and inlaid with brass and mother of pearl along lines scored with a chisel.
Hand made, so no two are identical. Small differences in the print, the dye and the finish are a record of the process and not a fault.
See the piecesHand block printed cotton, quilted
Dohars are crafted using a light weight three layer construction. A thin sheet of soft cotton muslin (mulmul) is sandwiched between two layers of mulmul, providing mild warmth without heavy bulk.
Dohars offer breathable layers of cotton with a thin cotton flannel core. It provides a comforting weight, allowing heat to escape naturally. Dohars help in regulating body temperature and keeping you comfortable during our winter months, often when the bedroom is warm and feels stifling.
See the piecesHand block printed cotton
Bagru and Sanganer sit an hour apart on the Jaipur plain and both print by hand with carved teak blocks. The night suits and jackets are being made now and will appear here as they arrive, photographed as they are.
See the piecesA note from the founders
I grew up with these objects in the house and spent years not noticing them. What changed was standing at a printing table in Bagru at seven in the morning and watching one man put four hundred impressions on a length of cloth without measuring anything. It was obvious then that the object was the smaller part of it.
Most of what reaches Britain from Rajasthan arrives through two or three sets of hands and loses its story on the way. It becomes generic. The price stops making sense, so it gets discounted, and the discount tells the customer what it is worth.
We buy direct, in small runs, from workshops we visit. We pay before the work starts. Every piece on this site names the craft, the town and the workshop, and when it says hand made it means somebody's hands and a number of days we can tell you.
That is the whole proposition. Less choice, more certainty about where it came from.
Renuka and Rachna
Co-founders, House of Aravalli
