Cream Damask Hand-Knotted Bamboo Viscose Rug

Ninety by a hundred and fifty centimeters (2'11" × 4'11") — small enough for the foot of a bed, the space in front of a chest of drawers, or a narrow entrance. Cream Damask Hand-Knotted Bamboo Viscose Rug: a cream ground with the damask drawn in gray, hand-knotted in an Indian workshop over cotton, the figures reserved for bamboo viscose. Small rugs get the pattern wrong more often than large ones, because a drawing scaled for a sitting room turns into fragments at a meter and a half.

01Up close to the pattern

Here the figures are sized to the piece and a whole one fits within the width. Cream lifts a dark hall and the gray keeps it from looking bridal; against oak, white or mink furniture the rug is warm, and against anthracite or black accessories the gray in it does the connecting. The pile is wool and cotton, the foundation is cotton, and bamboo viscose goes in nowhere but the damask — one fiber for wear and another for light.

02At the loom in in India

The knot count is high, which at this size means the drawing is genuinely legible rather than suggested. Two of these are in stock. It is a small rug in a pale color, so it will be the first thing in the hall to need washing, and that washing is a workshop's work rather than a bucket's. Hand-knotted in India on a cotton foundation, at a high knot density. Wool and cotton pile; bamboo viscose in the damask figures alone. Gray damask on cream, drawn at a scale that fits a small rug. 90 × 150 cm (2'11" × 4'11") — bedside, hallway or in front of a dresser. Warm beside oak and white; connected to anthracite and black by the gray. Pale and small, so it will want washing before anything else in the room. Professional washing. Most rugs this size are bought as an afterthought; this one was drawn for the size it is.