White Damask Hand-Knotted Round Rug

Cream on white, at almost no contrast: you find the damask the way you find a pattern pressed into linen, only when the light is on your side of it. White Damask Hand-Knotted Round Rug — a 200 cm circle, hand-tied over cotton in India with bamboo viscose through the pile, the damask worked in cream and beige across a white ground. A circle behaves differently in a room from a rectangle.

01Where it is laid

It has no direction, so it cannot be aligned wrongly, and it takes the hard edge off a square space, which is why it goes in the middle of a seating group, at the foot of a bed, or in a hall where three doors meet.

02A line from the archive

The pattern is symmetrical and repeats around the field without a center point, so nothing about the drawing tells you which way to walk in. Beside pale floorboards and natural-fiber furniture it is nearly invisible until the light rakes across it. Bamboo viscose is where the shine sits, and on a white rug that shine is most of what you see — the figures are drawn less by color than by the way they take light.

03Coming off the loom

The knotting is dense, and every row of it was set by hand. It is white, and that is not a small thing: this is a rug for a room people enter without shoes, and it will see the inside of a washing workshop more often than a dark piece would.

04What Wool does

Two pieces are in stock at this size. Hand-knotted in India on a cotton foundation, at a high knot density. Cotton, wool and bamboo viscose in the surface; the damask figures carry the sheen. Cream and beige damask on a white ground, at deliberately low contrast. Round, 200 × 200 cm (6'7" × 6'7"). No direction to it — it cannot be laid the wrong way round. White wants a shoeless room and more frequent washing. Professional washing. The pattern is there for the days the sun comes in at an angle, and on the other days it is simply a white circle, which is also worth having.