trc/Our Story

Our Story. Three generations, one loom

The Rug Chalet was founded on a small recognition that making had become increasingly distant from meaning. Designed in USA, Rooted in Jaipur. Shaped by decades inside looms, workshops, and weaving households, the house exists to restore coherence between the hand that makes and the room that receives.

▸ est. 1928 · Jaipur → the world
A letter from the founder

We didn't start a rug company. We inherited one - three generations of looms, dyers, and weavers in Jaipur - and decided, simply, not to break it.

What you find here is the same rug your great-grandfather would have recognised. The same knot, the same wool, the same patience. Only the floor has changed.

Founder · Jaipur
workshop · early morning · Jaipurworkshop · early morning · Jaipur
No. 01 - Where we are

A town that has done one thing well for four hundred years.

Jaipur sits in Rajasthan. Looms have been threaded here since the seventeenth century - the same villages, often the same families, knotting rugs that travel further than the people who make them.

We could have started anywhere. We started where the work already lived.

The studio occupies an old workshop on the edge of town: high windows, low looms, and the constant sound of beating combs. Forty-two looms across seven villages. The slowest takes fourteen months. The fastest, four.

No. 02 - Who we are

The same families, since 1976.

Every TRC rug is woven by a family that has woven for us and for our grandfather before us for three generations. The youngest weaver on our books is twenty-four. The eldest is seventy-one. They share a workshop, a wage scale, and a benchmark that has not changed: only what you would be proud to walk on.

Weavers are named on every rug. Their daughters and sons attend the studio school. Their looms are restored at the studio's cost. None of this is marketing it is simply how the workshop has run, since long before any of us thought it deserved a name.

41 years at the loom41 years at the loom
No. 03 - The slow ledger

A hundred years on a single floor.

1976

The first loom Jaipur

Grandfather threads his first warp in a single-room workshop on the edge of Jaipur. The loom is still in the studio, restored, weaving once a year.

1982

Antwerp

A rug woven for a young Belgian couple ships from Bombay. Forty years later, slightly faded, it returns to the workshop for repair the first piece in what becomes the studio's archive.

1991

The second generation takes the workshop

The second generation expands to seven villages, forty-two looms. The naming-of-weavers practice already informal becomes house standard.

2014

The studio school

The continuing-education programme opens. Uniforms, books, and fees covered for the children of every weaver on the workshop's books.

2026

TRC — direct to the room

Fifty years since the first warp went up in a single-room workshop on the edge of Jaipur. The original loom still works restored, weaving once a year. Around it: forty-two looms across seven villages, three generations of the same families. Nothing about the work has changed. That is the achievement.

No. 04 - What we hold

Four things we will not trade away.

Every other decision in the workshop bends to these four. They are not values in the marketing sense — they are the reasons the workshop is still standing.

01

The hand stays.

Every knot, every wash, every tassel — by hand. No machine finishes, no shortcuts. Slower, more expensive, more honest.

02

The family stays.

The same households, generation after generation. Wages reviewed annually, above regional fair-wage benchmark.

03

The wool stays.

Hand-spun in Jaipur. Four Fibres. Never blended with synthetics. Never washed in chemicals.

04

The story stays.

Every rug ships with a hand-typed object label — the weaver, the village, the lot. The provenance walks with the rug.