Tepper TEPP-2 Wool Handmade Carpet

Hand-tufted construction took its current commercial form in the United States after the Second World War, when the tufting gun made it possible to produce dense pile rugs in weeks rather than the months a hand-knotted equivalent demands. Indian workshops adopted the technique in the 1970s and have refined it for half a century, marrying the speed of the new tooling to the colour vocabulary of the older Persian and Mughal carpet traditions.

Two tufters and a finisher worked the rug over 4 weeks in India. The wool was gun-tufted into a stretched cotton primary backing, then sealed at the reverse with natural latex and bonded to a cotton scrim. The pile was sheared by hand with long blades to bring the polychrome field to a uniform plane, and a final pass with shears carved the motif a few millimetres clear of the ground so the pattern reads in relief at room scale.

The composition

The polychrome carries the field. The motif emerges as a tonal shift rather than a hard-edged graphic, which is the property that lets the rug sit in a composed room without claiming the eye. Up close, the carve work shows in the slight relief between figure and ground; at distance, the surface reads as a single saturated colour event.

The piece in a room

The rug suits a primary bedroom under the foot of the bed and the bedside passage, a sitting room arranged around a low coffee table, or a study floor under a single armchair and reading lamp. A polychrome field anchors a room with otherwise restrained palette. Walnut and oak flooring both suit the polychrome register; lime-washed walls deepen the read.

Care

Vacuum weekly with the beater bar disengaged; suction alone is enough to lift household soil from the pile. Blot spills with a clean cotton cloth, never rub. Light shedding is normal for the first six weeks as loose fibres clear from the pile, and the body of the rug is unaffected by the process. A professional dry clean every three years preserves the polychrome saturation and lifts ground-in soil that domestic vacuuming cannot reach.

Reference

• Medium: hand-tufted wool, latex bonded, cotton scrim backing
• Dimensions: size as listed
• Pile: 12 mm
• Hands: 2 tufters and 1 finisher, about 4 weeks
• Wool weight: roughly 2.4 kg per square metre
• Origin: India

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