Black and Cream Oushak Hand-Knotted Wool Long Runner, Mahal Series

A black border around a cream field is a hard edge to pull off, and it is what defines this piece: a hand-knotted runner in wool, Mahal series, 84 × 487 cm (2'9" × 16'0"), fine flower motifs on pale cream, enclosed by a black band worked with gold and red. Made in Pakistan; wool above, cotton below. One of one.

Black borders were never common in Oushak drawing, and there is a reason: black eats detail. Here the band is given its own gold and red figures so it stays a pattern rather than a void, and the effect at nearly five meters is a long bright field held between two dark rails. The cream inside is worked in fine, small-scale flowers, which is the correct scale for a rug this narrow — anything bigger would crowd it. Ivory in daylight, light beige in the evening, with red and green nuances surfacing in the border as the light drops.

Master weavers in Pakistan made it, working a dense, tightly packed knot along the whole length. What your foot meets is wool. The structure underneath is cotton, plus a fractional synthetic content, put there because a rug 487 cm long and 84 cm wide has almost no width to hold itself straight with. Every yarn in it was dyed by hand, which is why the cream field is not one flat tone and why the black reads slightly differently at the two ends. It should be washed by a professional; at this size that is not a decision but a logistics problem.

• Hand-knotted in Pakistan at a dense, tightly packed knot count.
• Wool surface; cotton structure with a fractional synthetic content.
• Pale cream field with fine flower motifs; black border worked in gold and red.
• 84 × 487 cm (2'9" × 16'0") — long halls, foyers, corridors that run the depth of a house.
• Hand-dyed yarns, so neither the cream nor the black is uniform end to end.
• Thin, hard-wearing and firm underfoot.
• The black band carries its own gold and red drawing so it does not read as a gap.
• Professional washing. A single runner.

It draws a straight dark line down a floor, and a house with a long hall in it is either improved by that or not; there is no middle result.