The MET Gala lights up the news cycle with high fashion and art each May. But the quiet hero at the uber glamorous event is the carpet rolled onto the steps of Fifth Avenue in NYC. Over the last four years, Kerala’s Neytt Homes, a Cherthala-based rug atelier, has crafted the carpet at the prestigious MET Gala.

Neytt’s legacy spans over 109 years. The story begins in 1917, when K. Velayudhan set up the Travancore Mats and Matting company. It transitioned to Extraweave Pvt Ltd. at the turn of the millennium, and is now known as Neytt Homes. The brand opened its first flagship outlet in North India and only its second in the country in 2025. This year, they have more to celebrate. For Sivan Santhosh, founder and CEO of Neytt Homes, and his partner and wife Nimisha Srinivas, the MET Gala carpet generates quite a buzz each May. However, converting interest to sales and partnerships required an imaginative experiential store in the heart of New Delhi. It helps build a pan-India presence, with buyers and designers thronging the crowded Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road in the national capital, home to a host of covetable rug ateliers.

Rugs on display

“Nimisha and I wanted to create a space where every rug is made visible, so we visited other rug stores in Sultanpur [South Delhi district] to see what they offered. Most resembled warehouses, where rugs were stacked. We wanted to create a gallery-like setting where rugs were displayed on walls, and you could discover something new around each corner,” explains Sivan.

For Rahul Mathew and Priya Rose, founders of Kochi-based architecture and design firm Workers of Art, designing this store was just an extension of a childhood friendship as Santhosh and Mathew went to the same school in Kochi.

“We started ideating in September 2024, and in under six months, we completed the project so the store opening could be scheduled for late February 2025,” states Mathew about the store in Delhi.

Crafting the basement

Located in Sultanpur, the 4,000-sq.ft. space was a blank canvas, but hidden from plain sight, as it was nestled in a basement. “We decided to take the scarlet logo itself and use the yarn motif to lead visitors to the stairway below and into the store. The yarn then transforms into a sculptural element in between two mounds draped with rugs, taking the brand’s logo palette (ivory-red) and the yarn leitmotif forward,” explains Mathew.

Rose explains the layout. “We decided to forgo perpendicular corners and use undulating partitions instead. It is designed like a maze with two mounds in the centre, making the space more dynamic while offering seating for visitors and an audience space during performances.”

The mounds were created on plywood with sisal rugs over them for texture, offering an ivory-hued neutral palette. The walls are also draped with sisal, while the black tiled floor offers a stark contrast. “The three-dimensional mounds had to be fabricated by our local carpenters in Kerala and then shipped and fitted in Delhi,” Santhosh adds.

From fibre to floor

The store is divided into three areas: publication, Know Your Rug and a design studio.

The publication wall celebrates Neytt’s international footprint, from the MET Gala carpets to handwoven pieces in the White House lawn. Each rug is accompanied by storytelling around its ideation, provenance and process. “We have a coffee table-style book revisiting our history and detailing our material and design philosophy. There is a write-up with an art installation of the transition from fibre to rug, as well,” states Santhosh.

Two in-house designers and a manager’s assistant guide customers as they move to the Know Your Rug section, which is populated with over 100 swatches from machine, flat weave, jacquard, tufted, hand-knotted and pit loom samples as well as types of rug material–Kashmiri wool, bamboo silk, sisal, linen, jute and banana silk.

The walls come alive with vibrant rugs from the Aadu collection, paying homage to the streets of Fort Kochi, where goats often roam. The Vallamkali rugs celebrate Kerala’s boat race, and motifs from nature and craft shine in the Kilivathil and Aranmula Kannadi repertoire. Multi-hued, high-pile rugs from designer collaborations offer a modern take on classical art, while other carpets evoke minimalist aesthetics. The rugs range in size, material and weaving style, priced between ₹6,000 and ₹12 lakh.

Visitors are treated to a complete sensorial experience as they feel the fibres, watch videos of weaving techniques, and a soundtrack of loom weaving plays in the background. The LED lights over the pelmets and along the floor through the store guide the eye.

Bespoke rugs & design lab

“We have introduced automation and tuning of lights to allow designers to personalise the lights from warm to cool tones, so customers can mimic the lighting in their homes as they choose a rug,” says Mathew. The final space is the design lab. It is a DIY area where in-house designers use software and four moodboards: minimalist, maximalist, traditional and colourful, along with weaving, material and dyeing techniques. Customers can see mock-ups of customised rugs on a projected screen.

“We ultimately want to include technology like AR (augmented reality), but that’s a work in progress,” adds Santhosh.

Waste into threads

Sustainability and deep cultural roots are embedded across the store. The restroom is curated with a woven wall covering showcasing elements of Kerala, fitted with a brass urli as a washbasin and the fragrance of the state’s flowers (kanikonna). “We like to weave sustainability into every aspect at our factory and store as well,” says Santhosh. The design lab has lamps woven by Sirohi (women’s SHG) weavers using leftover yarn from the store. “We innovate with new sustainable fibres created from recycled PET and Econyl (upcycled from discarded fishing nets and nylon fabric) and offer to buy back rugs from hospitality establishments so we can completely regenerate it into raw nylon and refashion it into a new carpet.”

As Neytt sets its sights on a pan-India footprint, this flagship experiential store has brought in visibility and avenues for collaboration. “It’s important to have a presence in the right place at the right time. We have one international and one Indian collaboration coming up (details to be announced soon). Even in the store, we want visitors to explore the space with a touch of whimsy, so we encourage you to climb the mound and get creative with your rug experience,” concludes Santhosh.

About Met Gala

This year for Met Gala’s Costume Art theme, Neytt sent 57 rolls of white carpet, with each piece measuring up to 4x30 metres, a total of 6,840 square metre of sisal fibre woven in a bouclé technique (textured fabric and yarn characterised by its looped appearance). Sisal is the chosen material for the carpet as it is a durable, stiff natural fibre derived from the leaves of the Agave sisalana plant, used to make rope, twine and rugs. Neytt sources their sisal from Madagascar, Tanzania and Brazil. The carpet has to be tightly woven to withstand stilettos and neutral coloured so artists can paint over it, based on the theme each year. “It took around 90 days from fibre to carpet. The rug went through 15 processes with quality inspection at each stage since it was an off-white carpet, and there is no place to hide imperfections,” explains Santosh.

While every rug and carpet is either hand-knotted or hand-tufted, this brand has embraced technology simultaneously with spinning equipment imported from Ireland, dyeing machines from Italy, coating machines from the U.S., and finishing machinery from Belgium.