Toulemonde Bochart: drawn in Paris, knotted in India and Nepal
Founded in the North in 1946, the house draws its rugs in Paris and has had them handmade in India and Nepal since the 1960s. Andrée Putman, McConnico and Castelbajac have designed for it.
2 MIN · 20 September 2026A rug is the only piece in an interior you look at while walking on it. So it must hold at two distances: that of the plan, and that of the footstep.
A house from the North, not a Parisian house
Toulemonde Bochart was founded in 1946 in the North of France by M. Toulemonde, a descendant of one of the region's textile dynasties. This is not a brand born in Paris: it is a Northern textile business that chose the rug, and that opened its Parisian shops much later.
From 1949, the house began having its rugs drawn by designers. The list, over eighty years, is worth a look: Andrée Putman, Hilton McConnico, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. Today the house is distributed in some sixty countries.
Where the rugs are actually made
In the 1960s, M. Toulemonde travelled across China and India in search of workshops able to produce his ranges. This is the origin of the current supply chain: the rugs are drawn in France and handmade in India and Nepal, by master dyers, spinners, weavers, tufters, knotters and washers.
We put it this way because that is how it is. “Handmade” is a phrase that means nothing if it does not specify by which hands and in which workshop; the precision takes nothing away from the quality of the rug, it simply lets you compare like with like. A hand-knotted rug from Nepal and a machine-tufted rug are not the same object, do not cost the same price, and do not last the same time.
Why it interests us
The rug is the blind spot of the scan. We photograph a sofa, a lamp, a chair — rarely the floor. Yet it is the piece where the price gap between two objects of similar appearance is the most violent, and where the difference shows the least in a photograph: the knot density, the wool, the dye do not read on a screen.
And this is the day to think about it: this week we are publishing an article on the Studio Andrée Putman, which designed for this house.
Go there
Toulemonde Bochart — Sentier showroom, 10 rue du Mail, 75002 Paris; Raspail shop, 29 boulevard Raspail, 75007 Paris. Projects trail of Paris Design Week.
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