Jaipur Living’s CallaLuxe Bridges Design and Functionality

A rug is among the harder design commitments in a home: often large, expensive, and exposed to everything from red wine to muddy paws. For years, buyers who wanted durability turned toward synthetic performance rugs that rarely looked or felt like the wool pieces they were meant to replace. Jaipur Living is betting it can close that gap. Founded in 1978 with just nine artisans and two looms, today, it works with a network of more than 40,000 weavers, most of them in rural India. CEO Asha Chaudhary, who took over the family business her father founded, describes the company’s role as a bridge. “We see Jaipur Living as the conduit between a 2,500-year-old craft and the modern consumer,” she says.

The company’s latest collection, CallaLuxe, was developed in response to design partners that wanted the classic look of wool without its vulnerability to stains. “They wanted performance, but they didn’t want a rug that looked or felt like a performance rug,” Chaudhary says. Instead of adjusting an existing collection, the team spent more than two years developing a new fiber.

The material is solution-dyed acrylic, prized for resisting stains and fading, but handled more like wool. “Rather than simply trying to make acrylic look like wool at the end of the process, we went all the way back to the raw material,” Chaudhary explains. The fibers are cut short, blended by color, and spun using techniques borrowed from natural yarns. The goal is the softness and subtle color variation typical of wool, which most performance rugs, made by twisting differently colored yarns together, tend to lack. The rugs are still hand-knotted, handwoven, or hand-tufted by the company’s artisans. Chaudhary sees CallaLuxe as part of a larger shift in the category, “not asking people to choose between beauty and durability.”