Cream Floral Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug, Hanzâde Series

It handles like cloth rather than like a floor covering — thin, cool, and soft enough that it folds instead of creasing. Cream Floral Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug, Hanzâde Series, woven in Türkiye from 82 × 295 cm (2'8" × 9'8") to 172 × 240 cm (5'8" × 7'10"), with fine flowers and Sarılma Rumi motifs across a cream ground. Rumi is the interlaced, split-leaf figure that runs through Seljuk and Ottoman ornament, and Sarılma Rumi is the version where the leaves wrap around one another instead of standing apart.

01Up close to the pattern

Drawn small and repeated, it fills the space between the flowers without competing with them. Silk is what makes the rug change: look along the pile from one end and the surface is bright, almost wet; walk around and look back from the other, and the same cream goes matt and several shades deeper. The rug is the same rug.

02At the loom in in Türkiye

The direction of the pile is not. Wool and silk are knotted together by hand, month after month, and the fringes are tied on individually at the end. Silk is the reason for the shine and also the reason for the caution: this is not a rug to leave under a chair leg or to attack with a domestic machine, and only a specialist should ever wash it. Pure silk hand-weaving has grown scarce enough that a mixed wool-and-silk piece is now the practical way to own the effect. Hand-knotted in Türkiye in wool and silk. Cream ground with fine flowers and Sarılma Rumi interlace. One face reads bright and reflective, the other matt and darker, depending on where you stand. Months of knotting per piece, with the fringes tied one by one at the finish. Sizes from a 82 × 295 cm (2'8" × 9'8") runner to 172 × 240 cm (5'8" × 7'10"). Washing by a specialist only. Heavy furniture will mark a silk pile; place it where it will be walked on rather than stood on. What is the Sarılma Rumi motif? Rumi is the interlaced split-leaf figure of Seljuk and Ottoman ornament.

03What the yarn is

In the Sarılma Rumi version the leaves wrap around each other rather than sitting side by side, which produces a continuous line the eye can follow across the field without stopping. Why does the rug look like two colors? Silk fibers reflect light along their length. Looked at with the pile lying away from you the surface is bright; looked at against the pile it goes matt and darker. Nothing has been dyed differently and the effect will not fade. In ten years the wool will have flattened a little and the silk will still be doing this, which is the argument for buying the two fibers together.