Multicolor Oushak Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug, Elvan Series

Multicolor Oushak Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug, Elvan Series — a cream ground carrying a dense Oushak field of flowers and medallions in red, blue, pink, turquoise, orange and purple, knotted by hand in India at 182 × 273 cm (6'0" × 8'11"). The ground is wool; every colored passage is sari silk. There is one of it.

Each medallion has been given a color combination of its own rather than repeating the one beside it, and fine branch and leaf work runs between them to hold the field together. The nearest thing to it is stained glass: the eye stops somewhere different each time and finds a pairing it had not noticed before. A narrow border wraps the ground and repeats the same palette at closer intervals, so the frame is busier than the field it encloses. In a room with beige or white walls and a plain gray sofa, the color becomes the character of the space and nothing else has to.

Elvan means many-colored, which is description rather than flourish. A piece this size is many months at the loom in India. Wool makes the ground, matt and firm, while the pattern is worked in sari silk — short-staple silk fiber drawn from the making of sari cloth, and the reason the colors sit so high and bright against the wool around them. No synthetic yarn goes into the piece. Because the colorways are assembled one rug at a time, another arranged exactly this way is not something the house can promise. The washing is specialist work.

• Wool and sari silk, knotted by hand in India across several months.
• 182 × 273 cm (6'0" × 8'11") — an entrance, a sitting room, a bedroom or a conservatory.
• Cream ground with a dense Oushak field of flowers and medallions.
• Every medallion carries its own color pairing; the border repeats the palette more tightly.
• Sari silk in the colored passages, wool through the ground.
• No synthetic yarn in the construction.
• One piece; the colorway is not repeated.
• Professional washing.

Rooms that have gone quiet tend to get a new lamp; this is the other solution, and it lasts longer.