I just made the move to Santa Fe. Bare walls, floors that echo, the specific low-grade dread of a new place that doesn't feel like yours yet. The first practical problem of a new life in a new city is furniture, and the first name someone handed me was Sukhmani. I went in skeptical — I've been burned by "curated" shops that turn out to be glorified home goods chains — and I walked out having lost two hours and needing to come back.
Sukhmani Jewelry & Furnishings sits at 340 Read Street in the Railyard District, that stretch of Santa Fe where the contemporary arts scene runs alongside converted industrial buildings and an enormous amount of New Mexico sky. The exterior is classic adobe: a rounded arch frames the entrance, a wreath of bright flowers climbs the doorway, a carved white bench anchors the front. It does not scream for your attention. It doesn't have to.
Step through and the scale shifts. The ceilings go dark, the floor is polished concrete, and the room opens into what I can only describe as a very serious collector's living room — if that collector had spent decades sourcing globally and had genuinely good taste. A deep leather club chair sits beside a sculptural teak coffee table. Hand-carved door frames from another era lean against the walls like they're still deciding where they belong. Brass Ganesh figures share shelf space with matte terracotta vessels the size of a small child. Moroccan-style pierced metal pendants hang overhead. The turquoise apothecary cabinet stopped me cold.
This is not a room where everything matches. It's a room where everything means something, and the tension between objects is exactly the point. That takes decades of eye. Sukhmani has been family-owned since 1979, and you feel it in the confidence of the edit. Nothing is here by accident. The inventory runs to one-of-a-kind furniture and decor pieces available exclusively in store — which means you are making a decision in the room, not going home to price-check it online. That constraint turns out to be a feature. It forces you to reckon with what you actually want.
I had the good fortune of meeting owner Sat Gurumukh Khalsa while I was there. He talked about pieces the way a painter talks about light — tracing provenance, explaining proportion, noting what a particular wood does in afternoon sun. You get the sense he knows exactly where every object came from and why it deserves to be here. His shop reflects that completely. The full offer goes well beyond furniture: Sukhmani carries handcrafted jewelry and runs interior design services throughout New Mexico. So if you're one of those people who came to Santa Fe and started thinking about staying for good, Sat and his team can help you build a whole home, not just fill one room.
The pieces here are built to live with the particular quality of New Mexico light — warm plaster tones, aged wood, bronze and brass that shift from burnished to glowing depending on the hour. None of it fights the landscape. It reads like it was selected with the understanding that Santa Fe rooms have a specific relationship with the sun, and that relationship is part of the design problem. Sukhmani solves it without making a fuss about it.
I went in needing furniture. I left with a longer list, a clearer sense of what I was actually after, and a standing plan to return. Call ahead at (505) 772-0493, go to 340 Read Street, and give yourself a real block of time. What you find in that room may not be what you expected to want — and that's the whole point.