The Ziegler workshops set the template for the carpet that the late nineteenth-century English country house wanted on its floor: floral, but not crowded; classical, but with air around the motifs. The pattern here descends from that vocabulary, drawn out in palmettes and trailing vines that read clearly across the room and reward a close inspection.

Tied by a single pair of hands over 3 months. Persian asymmetric knotting at roughly 100 KPSI. Roughly 538,000 hand-tied knots in total. The fibre is wool, hand-spun, and slightly uneven at the strand, which is what gives the rug its lived patina. All colour comes from plant matter, prepared in slow vats over weeks rather than minutes; the result is the slight irregularity that gives a hand-knotted vegetable-dyed carpet its patina.

The composition

Colour reads as ivory and faded indigo blue. An all-over floral field rather than a central medallion, in the Ziegler manner: the eye finds incident wherever it lands but is not pulled to one focal point. The colour will not stay still: a few seasons of light will warm the brighter passages and deepen the darker ones, which is the patina the rug is designed to acquire.

What you are buying

What sets a hand-knotted carpet apart from any other furnishing is that it is built to outlast its first owner and gain value while it does so. Comparable workshop weavings in this tradition trade at multiples of the price asked here when they appear at international auction with provenance.

The piece in a room

2'6" x 15' (76 x 457 cm) is a runner format for a long corridor, a kitchen galley, or a stair landing. The ivory blue pairs with wooden floors and runs the length of the space without breaking the visual line. The narrow loom width keeps the geometry tight and legible end to end. A piece at this scale settles the architecture of the room around itself.

Conservation

The carpet wants two simple things: regular rotation, and gentle cleaning. Turn it half a revolution every six months, vacuum once a week with the beater bar lifted, blot spills with a clean cotton cloth. Have it hand-washed by a wool conservator at five-year intervals. The rug is built to outlive its first owner and reward the next.

Reference

• Medium: hand-knotted wool on cotton foundation
• Dimensions: 2'6" x 15' (76 x 457 cm)
• Construction: Persian asymmetric knot
• Knot density: ~100 KPSI
• Total knot count: ~538,000
• Hands: 1 weaver, 3 months
• Pile: shorn close, hand-finished
• Dye: vegetable-dyed
• Origin: India

Ships free across India. Cash on delivery available. Exchange within 7 days of receipt.