Blue Karabagh Rose-Pattern Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

Blue Karabagh Rose-Pattern Hand-Knotted Wool Rug, which reads at a distance like a chintz seen through water — flowers in full color, blue behind them, everything softened slightly by the pile. Made by hand in Afghanistan, where the weavers double each knot, wool over a cotton foundation, 174 × 237 cm (5'9" × 7'9"). A Halıcızade design, and there is one of them.

Come closer and the softness resolves into drawing. The blossoms are Karabagh roses, laid over the blue at regular intervals and interpreted for a modern room rather than copied from a nineteenth-century flatweave, and their colors run warm across the whole spectrum the region uses. Blue takes them well: it holds them apart from one another and stops a floral field from turning into wallpaper. With English-style furniture or heavy solid wood the rug looks like it was always there; in a spare modern room it is the warmth.

Wool makes the surface, entirely. Cotton builds the base, and a minor proportion of recycled synthetic thread goes in beside it purely for strength. Knotting doubled around two warps produces a tight, close structure — the thing that decides whether a rug survives a household or merely survives a decade. What it also produces is small drift: the roses in the upper half are not exact copies of the roses in the lower half, because a person put them there. Give it to a washer whose trade is rugs, and to nobody else.

• Hand-knotted in Afghanistan, tied double over two warps.
• Wool surface; the base is cotton plus a minor proportion of recycled synthetic thread.
• Karabagh roses in warm colors, spaced evenly over a blue field.
• Small differences between one flower and the next, which is the signature of hand knotting.
• 174 × 237 cm (5'9" × 7'9"), sized for a sitting room or a bedroom.
• Made for Halıcızade; a single rug.
• Washing by a rug specialist.

Floral rugs are usually bought for the flowers and kept for the ground, and this ground is the reason it will still be down in fifteen years.