Blue Authentic-Pattern Round Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Urkum Series

A circle 180 × 180 cm (5'11" × 5'11") is a specific object with a specific job, and this is the Urkum version of it: a round loom-woven rug in 100% wool, dark blue as a night sky, scattered with yellow, red, white and gray figures, with colored fringes at the rim.

01At the loom in in India

It is woven in India. Dark blue behaves on a floor the way it behaves overhead — it recedes, and everything placed on it comes forward. The bright figures take advantage of that: yellow reads at full strength here in a way it never does on beige, and the small white marks work almost as stars.

02The origin of the pattern

The fringe is deliberately mismatched in color, which is the one place the rug allows itself to be playful. Urkum takes its drawing from Gabbeh, a nomadic weaving tradition of Anatolia and the Middle East in which each figure is a shorthand for something remembered rather than a decorative motif.

03The mark of slow weaving

The rug is built on a loom and finished by hand — neither machine-made nor knotted, but the step between the two — and the result is a thick, solid surface. Anyone with a respiratory sensitivity should think twice: this is a heavy wool pile and it behaves like one.

04After the color

A rug washer, not a machine, when it needs cleaning. Loom-woven in India, hand labor and machine work combined; made for Halıcızade. 100% wool throughout. Deep night-blue ground with yellow, red, white and gray Gabbeh figures. Mismatched colored fringes at the rim. Round, 180 cm across, for a table setting or the center of a room. Thick and solid to stand on rather than soft. A heavy wool pile; think twice if breathing is sensitive in the household. A rug washer, not a machine. Blue floors are rarer than they should be, and a circle of one is rarer still.