Mink Plain Sheepskin Rug, Toscana Series

Four meters long and eighty centimeters across: 80 × 400 cm (2'7" × 13'1") is the one length left in this piece, which makes it a runner rather than a rug. Toscana series plain sheepskin in mink-gray, from South Africa, with a long soft nap and no pattern on it at all. Sheepskin is warm to the hand before anybody has warmed it, which is the reason it ended up on floors at all.

01Color, by the light

The nap here is long and lies in one direction, so the color reads two ways — silver when you walk toward the lie of the wool, deeper gray-mink when you walk against it. The maker's own note on it is that the softness of lambskin plus the restraint of gray-mink is what makes it work in a modern room, and that is fair: this is a warm material in a cold color, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. The maker adds a caution about color that deserves repeating.

02What the yarn is

Photographs of a napped hide are never quite right, because the tone shifts with the light in the room, the angle it comes from, and which way the fibers happen to be lying — expect the piece in your hallway to differ somewhat from the picture on the screen.

03To make it last

Care is straightforward and limited: it can be wiped down, and beyond that the job belongs to a professional cleaner rather than to water. Four meters is a corridor length, and there is one of it. Sheepskin, made in South Africa, from the Toscana series. Plain, undrawn, in mink-gray with a long nap. 80 × 400 cm (2'7" × 13'1") — a corridor runner, and the only length in stock. The tone changes with the direction of the nap and the light in the room. Warm underfoot from the first step, which no woven rug is. The screen will not match the hallway; the maker says so first. Wipe clean; professional cleaning for anything more. A single piece at this length. Thirteen feet of something warm is the answer to a corridor that nobody wants to cross barefoot in February.