Gurgaon
— — the city the fields became, faster than anyone planned.
Not only on a wall.
“A satellite city of Delhi that grew up almost overnight. Forty years ago, this was farmland and mustard fields under the Aravalli foothills; today it is a forest of glass towers, call centres, and Indian headquarters for half the Fortune 500. The locals call it Gurugram now. The peacocks still come down from Sultanpur in the morning.
Gurgaon, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Officially renamed Gurugram in 2016, the city sits in Haryana state about thirty kilometres southwest of New Delhi, along the Aravalli range, among the oldest fold mountains on earth. Population crossed 1.5 million in the most recent district census, though the wider National Capital Region pulls millions more through it each working day. The DLF Cyber City and Udyog Vihar clusters anchor what is now one of India's largest office markets, sprung from agricultural land within a single generation.
The land here was wheat and mustard until the late 1980s, when Maruti Suzuki opened its first plant nearby and DLF began acquiring farmland for what would become India's first private township. The change accelerated after the 1991 economic liberalisation. By the 2010s, Gurgaon held the headquarters of Google India, Microsoft India, and dozens of other multinationals. Older residents still call neighbourhoods by their village names — Sikanderpur, Chakkarpur, Nathupur — under the towers that replaced them.
Sultanpur National Park, about fifteen kilometres west of the city core, holds one of north India's richest winter bird gatherings — Siberian cranes, painted storks, flamingos — from October through March. Kingdom of Dreams, near Sector 29, stages large-scale Indian theatre and Bollywood-tied productions. The metro's Yellow Line and the Rapid Metro connect the office clusters to central Delhi in under an hour, easiest before 9am or after 8pm to clear the inbound commuter crush.