New Delhi, Jan. 31 -- Every few days, Priyanka Sharma and Dushyant Bansal, founders of design Studio Raw Material, go out seeking "white gold" in Rajasthan's Makrana. The city is famous for its bright, white marble. Sharma and Bansal, though, are more interested in picking the marble that has been discarded with just one idea in mind: turning the waste into beautiful objects of art and luxury.

This has been their focus since 2017, when they started the studio in Makrana, naming it for the raw material that surrounded them. "I come from a marble industry family," says Bansal, who graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, in 2016 with a master's in interior design. "I know Makrana well; it's become a landscape of dumped marble...