Mink Vintage-Pattern Loom-Woven Tencel Rug, Günyolu Series

From a standing height it looks like a plain mink rug, and that is the trick: the flowers and spirals only separate from the ground once you crouch or the light moves. A Günyolu-series piece, loom-woven in Kütahya and Oushak from Tencel® over a cotton foundation.

01Up close to the pattern

Seven sizes are woven; the smallest is 90 × 150 cm and the biggest 300 × 390 cm, which is 9'10" by 12'10". The motifs are drawn in pastel tones a shade or two off the ground, which is the narrowest contrast a rug can carry and still have a pattern at all.

02Which furniture, which room

It is a design for a room where nothing is competing — where the sofa, the walls and the floor are all speaking at the same volume and none of them wins. Mink is warm enough to hold its own beside cream and beige and steady enough to sit under earth tones without going muddy.

03What the yarn is

Next to velvet, marble or brass fittings it looks considered rather than safe, which is the argument for it. Tencel® is the whole face and cotton is the whole foundation; there is no wool in the rug. The natural luster of Tencel® is what makes the hidden pattern legible at all — at different hours of the day the surface gives up different parts of it.

04The mark of slow weaving

Weaving is done on the looms at Kütahya and Oushak by women in the district, hand work and machine knotting combined in the same piece, and the result is fine enough that people who know rugs still have to check the back. Each piece carries its own weave number.

05After the color

The series name comes from Kemaliye, in Erzincan — Günyolu is a village up in those mountains. Loom-woven at Kütahya and Oushak by women in the district. Tencel® face on a cotton foundation; no wool. Pale floral and spiral motifs a shade off the mink ground, visible only up close. Works beside cream, beige and earth-toned schemes, and beside velvet, marble and brass. Each rug carries a unique weave number and the house tree of life. Seven sizes: 90 × 150, 90 × 190, 90 × 390, 130 × 190, 200 × 300, 240 × 340 and 300 × 390 cm. Professional washing. Anyone who wants a rug to be noticed from the doorway should buy a different one; this is for the person who wants to keep finding it.