Gray Damask Hand-Knotted Rug

The shine in the figures is bamboo viscose and nothing else — no finish, no treatment. Gray Damask Hand-Knotted Rug: wool, cotton and bamboo viscose tied row by row over an Indian cotton warp, with a classical damask drawing standing pale against a gray ground, at 175 × 245 cm.

Damask is a figured drawing rather than a repeated block, and the figures here are drawn open, with enough gray between them that the rug reads as a soft field from across the room and only resolves into stems and blossoms when you are standing on it. Gray in this tone is close to silver and behaves accordingly: it goes bright where daylight falls across the pile and drops to a flat pewter where it does not. Beside white, cream or pale oak the rug is quiet; beside black, navy or dark oak it stops being quiet and becomes the contrast in the room.

The knots are set close and every row is tied by hand, which is why the drawing holds its edges at this scale. Wool and cotton carry the ground, bamboo viscose carries the figures, and the foundation underneath is cotton — three yarns doing three jobs. Bamboo viscose is a cellulose fiber, sold elsewhere as bamboo silk; this house does not use that name. It also means the surface takes footmarks, and they stay until somebody sweeps the pile the other way.

• Hand-knotted in India on a cotton foundation, at a close knot spacing.
• Wool and cotton in the ground, bamboo viscose in the damask figures.
• 175 × 245 cm (5'9" × 8'0"); the design is also made at 90 × 300 cm and 200 × 300 cm.
• Silver-gray that brightens under daylight and flattens under a lamp.
• The figures are drawn open, with gray showing between them.
• Footmarks show on the viscose and brush out.
• Washing by a rug specialist.

Damask has been in and out of fashion for four hundred years, and it survives because it is the one classical drawing that does not insist on classical furniture around it.