Beige Mamluk Loom-Woven Tencel Rug, Günyolu Series

Beige Mamluk Loom-Woven Tencel Rug, Günyolu Series — a loom-woven rug with a Tencel® pile carried on cotton, sized 200 × 300 cm (6'7" × 9'10"), showing three large octagonal medallions in a vertical row on a beige ground.

01The tone of the ground

The wear across it is drawn, not acquired: the copper, earth and gray blotches were designed in from the start. Mamluk drawing is among the strictest in the repertoire — octagon inside octagon, every element answering another across an axis — and laying a faded surface over that strictness is what makes this rug difficult to place. Step back and it reads old.

02A line from the archive

Come closer and the fine geometry inside each medallion appears, sharp where the ground is soft, and the age turns out to have been very carefully built. In a room with older furniture and dark boards it behaves like something found rather than something bought. The series borrowed its name from a mountain village above Kemaliye, in Erzincan province; in Turkish the word reads as the day's road.

03Coming off the loom

The rugs themselves come off looms a long way from there, in Kütahya and in Uşak, where the structure is set mechanically and finished by hand — the middle construction, denser than a machine rug and quicker than a knotted one.

04What Wool does

Tencel®, the Lenzing lyocell made out of wood pulp, takes the pile here, and its luster is what keeps the copper in the distressing alive as light crosses the floor. Loom-woven in Kütahya and Uşak, in western Türkiye. Tencel® pile over a cotton foundation; there is no wool in this one. Three octagonal Mamluk medallions in a vertical row on beige. Copper, earth and gray distressing, drawn into the design rather than worn into it. Fine geometric fill inside each medallion, visible only up close. Two meters by three, which is a full salon size. Bearing the Halıcızade tree of life. Professional washing. It will sit under a dining table without ever quite settling into the background, which will be exactly why some people want it and exactly why others will not.