Red Medallion Round Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Tempus Series

A circle two meters across, 200 cm (6'7"), which is a rare shape for a rug to take. A wool rug loom-woven for the Tempus series, carrying a fourteenth-century Oushak medallion in navy and gold on a deep red ground.

01Where the Medallion comes from

Set at the middle of a room it becomes the point everything else arranges itself around, because a circle faces no particular way. The medallion sits dead center and repeats outward in rings, so the drawing reads the same from every chair in the room — the reason the round format was used for medallion patterns in the first place. Red is doing the heavy work here: it holds the older Oushak forms up and keeps them from looking archaeological.

02The tone of the ground

Navy pins the outlines and gold picks out the small hooks and rosettes inside them. Under a warm bulb the ground deepens toward burgundy; in daylight the gold separates and the pattern gains a step of relief. Loom-woven in the Aegean, which is the middle construction between a knotted rug and a machine-made one — the ground is built on a powered loom, then the ends and fringes are closed by hand.

03From ground to pile

The pile is wool over a cotton warp, medium in height and packed tightly enough to keep the circle from going oval underfoot. The house tree-of-life is woven into every Tempus piece, not stitched on afterwards.

04After the color

Have it washed by a rug specialist rather than at home; a round rug is harder to block back into shape than a rectangle, and a wash house knows that. Loom-woven in Türkiye's Aegean region; powered loom, hand finishing. Wool pile on a cotton warp, medium height, densely set. Round: 200 cm (6'7") in diameter. Fourteenth-century Oushak medallion in navy and gold on a deep red ground. Marked with the house tree-of-life. Suits an entrance hall, a study, or the center of a seating group with the sofas set around it. Send it to a specialist wash house rather than cleaning it at home. Why choose a round rug over a rectangle? There are no corners on a circle to line up against the walls, so it never argues with the geometry of a room.

05From the hand of the weaver

It suits furniture arranged inward — around a coffee table, beneath a round dining table, or at an entrance approached from several directions. What is an Oushak medallion pattern? Oushak, in western Anatolia, is a weaving town whose workshops have been drawing large central medallions since the fourteenth century.

06The origin of the pattern

The medallion is one dominant figure at the middle of the field, ringed by smaller repeating forms, with the border echoing those shapes at a reduced scale. Rolled out on bare boards with nothing else in the room, it would still look finished.