India’s Streets
Are More Than Pathways
They are living archives of culture, memory, and architecture, places where history lingers, stories unfold, and everyday life becomes part of the landscape.
Created in collaboration between HANDS and Sonal Tuli, the collection brings together contemporary design thinking and time-honoured craftsmanship.
It stems from WITHIN's Art Furniture Series and is handcrafted in India by the skilled artisans of HANDS. Each carpet translates the essence of Indian streets into a refined, tactile language.
Sonal Tuli is co-founder and principal designer at WITHIN, a multidisciplinary practice in New Delhi whose work moves between interior architecture, furniture, lighting, graphics and carpet design without treating any of them as separate disciplines. The furniture work that this collection grew out of has been recognised at the A' Design Award.
She is known for a particular refusal. She does not reproduce Indian craft; she puts it to work on something new. Age-old artisanal skill, turned toward modern design objects rather than toward imitations of old ones.
The designer's love for Indian streets emerges as a kaleidoscope of landscapes, motifs, textures, craft and colour, quietly woven into this translation.
Collection
Showcase
Streets of India is a walkthrough into the everyday poetry of Indian cities. It journeys through Delhi, Banaras, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Jaisalmer, Kochi and Kolkata, places where history is layered and life spills into every corner.
The collection traces Indian streets as lived landscapes, shaped by movement and pause, where sanctity and spontaneity coexist.
Each city reveals itself slowly, taking form through the meticulous layering of stories within stories
Delhi has been built and unbuilt and built again seven times over, and the design takes that at its word. History, architecture and ordinary daily life laid over one another, none of them agreeing to leave
Banaras and its unbroken relationship with the Ganga, where ritual, memory and everyday life flow together and have done for longer than most cities have existed.
Mumbai caught through its constant movement. A city where heritage, ambition and the sea exist in perpetual exchange, and where the water sets the edge that everything else must negotiate with.
Hyderabad's layered identity. A meeting point of architecture, heritage, gastronomy and progress, held together on streets where all four happen at once, and none of them apologise for it.
An ode to Jaisalmer, shaped by the quiet poetry of its desert landscape and the stories held within its streets. A city the colour of the ground it stands on.
Kochi's waterways and its maritime legacy, weaving together nature, trade and centuries of cultural exchange that arrived by sea and decided to stay.
A portrait of Kolkata's warmth, its intellect and its everyday joy. A city that takes a long time over things deliberately and is right to.
Rendered in subtle tones and intricate detailing, the carpets become quiet storytellers that ground spaces in memory, movement, and the unmistakable rhythm of India.
No two of them speak the same visual language. That is the point of the collection rather than an inconsistency within it.
Why These Are Tufted,
Not Knotted
Every carpet in Streets of India is hand-tufted, and that is a decision.
In hand-tufting, the yarn is worked through a backing cloth with a hand-held gun and the pile is then set in place, instead of each knot being tied individually into the foundation of a loom. It is a different craft with a different gift.
What tufting gives a designer is freedom. Pile heights can change across a single piece. Densities can shift. Texture can be carved, raised and dropped wherever a drawing asks for it. A knotted carpet resolves everything to the grid of its own knots, which is a discipline of its own and a beautiful one. A tufted carpet can hold a painterly line, a soft edge, a passage that lifts off the surface.
When the subject is seven cities, each one demanding its own language, that freedom is the whole reason the collection can exist in this form.
The trade deserves saying plainly. A hand-tufted carpet is not built on the same generational timescale as a hand-knotted one. It is built to carry a drawing.
Wool & The sheen of
Botanical Silk
Each piece is woven in wool with botanical silk.
The wool holds the structure and takes the depth of the colour. The botanical silk, a plant-derived fibre used for its sheen, is doing something more specific. It sits at a different angle to the light than the wool around it, so parts of every drawing lift and settle as you move past them.
On a collection about streets, and about the way light falls down them at different hours, that is not a finishing flourish. It is half the drawing.
Where a Carpet
Like This Belongs
These are works with a function, and they are happiest where they can be seen entire.
A dining room where the table sits centred, and the border stays in view. A living room where the piece is not swallowed by a sectional. A study, or a wide landing, where one carpet is allowed to do all the work in the room and nothing else competes with it.
The seven sizes sit close together, from 6'8" × 9'11" to 7'8" × 11'7", so the real question is rarely which size. It is which city.
The Poetry
Of The Everyday
There is something endlessly humbling about Indian streets: their ability to hold chaos and calm within the same breath.
They are places where the past and present coexist effortlessly, where grand histories meet ordinary moments, and where every turn seems to reveal another story.
Streets of India captures that feeling in woven form.
India is infinite, and this collection is an invitation to wander through a little of it, one city, one story, one carpet at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who designed the Streets of India collection?
Sonal Tuli, co-founder and principal designer at WITHIN, a multidisciplinary design practice in New Delhi. The collection is a collaboration credited as HANDS × SONAL TULI, and it stems from WITHIN's Art Furniture Series.
Which cities are in the collection?
Seven. Delhi, Banaras, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Jaisalmer, Kochi and Kolkata. Each city is one carpet.
What is WITHIN's Art Furniture Series?
An ongoing body of design work from WITHIN, the New Delhi practice Sonal Tuli co-founded, which takes age-old Indian artisanal skills and applies them to contemporary design objects. Streets of India grew out of that series and carries the same intent into weaving.
What is a hand-tufted carpet?
A hand-tufted carpet is made by working yarn through a backing cloth with a hand-held tufting gun, then setting the pile and finishing the reverse. It is a hand-made craft, and a different one from hand-knotting, where every knot is tied individually into the foundation of a loom.
What is botanical silk?
Botanical silk is a plant-derived fibre used in weaving for its sheen and for the way it answers light differently from wool. It is a separate material from pure silk. Every piece in Streets of India is woven in wool with botanical silk.
What sizes are the carpets?
- Jaisalmer 6'8" × 9'11"
- Kolkata 7' × 10'
- Hyderabad 7'5" × 10'
- Kochi 8'2" × 8'6"
- Banaras 6'10" × 10'
- Delhi 7'5" × 10'4"
- Mumbai 7'8" × 11'7".
