Gray and Blue Oushak Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Tempus Series

Gray and Blue Oushak Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Tempus Series — an Oushak drawing carried in blue over a gray ground, wool over a cotton warp, woven on looms in western Anatolia, on the Aegean side.

01Choosing the size

Six sizes are made, the smallest 80 × 150 cm (2'7" × 4'11") and the largest 250 × 350 cm (8'2" × 11'6"), and an 80 cm runner three meters long. Oushak is the weaving town of western Anatolia whose rugs turn up in sixteenth-century European paintings, which is roughly how long its drawing has been copied.

02After the color

What has been changed here is not the pattern but the palette: blue and gray in place of the reds and golds the old Oushaks used, so a design that would otherwise announce itself instead stays level with the room. Put it with pale walls, light oak and off-white upholstery and the effect is open and cool. Put the same rug with dark furniture and the blue turns emphatic.

03What Wool does

The pattern carries cultural weight and the color does not, which is the reason this one sells to people who say they do not like patterned rugs. Wool makes the surface, over a cotton warp, laid down on the loom at medium depth and packed tightly enough that a corner picked up has real weight to it.

04At the loom in in Anatolia

The workshops that weave it were knotting by hand two generations ago and now do the structural work mechanically. A tree of life is woven into every rug in the series, and that is the mark by which a Tempus piece is told from a copy. It is not hand-knotting and the house does not sell it as such. Woven on looms in western Anatolia, near the Aegean. Wool surface on a cotton warp. A classical Oushak drawing in blue over a gray ground. Medium depth, dense weave, easy to vacuum. A tree of life is woven into every rug in the series. Six sizes: 80 × 150, 130 × 190, 160 × 230, 200 × 300 and 250 × 350 cm, and an 80 cm runner at 300 cm. Send it to a rug washer. Sixteenth-century drawing, twenty-first-century color, and the join between them is the whole of the design.