Style
Classic/Traditional
Every piece in this style, across all of our collections. Narrow them down by size and price.
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- 9 x 12
- 10 x 14
- 12 x 15
- Over 12 x 15
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Stories from the Classic/Traditional Archive
Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.
The Art of Bespoke Design by Rug & Kilim: How a Painting, a Fabric, or a Fragment Becomes a Custom Rug
Every custom rug begins with a question that sounds simple and is not: what does this room want to stand on? The answer, in the finest commissions, rarely arrives as a specification. It arrives as an object. A client brings in a painting they have loved for thirty years. A designer adores a length of antique silk, or lays down a sample of a document fabric, or produces a photograph of a fresco glimpsed on a wall in Ravenna. The brief is a feeling, held in another medium, waiting to be carried into wool or silk or sometimes, exotic fibres. This act of carrying is the true art of the custom rug, and it is far older and more serious than the word “custom” suggests. It is translation, in the fullest literary sense: the movement of meaning from one language into another, with everything gained and lost that translation implies. It is also, increasingly, the way the most celebrated interiors in the world are made. When AD100 designer Heidi Caillier needed flatweaves for a coastal retreat, when Fawn Galli reimagined a historic Beaux-Arts townhouse on the Upper West Side, when a Jacques Grange penthouse called for a hand-knotted silk carpet, the floor did not come off a shelf. It was translated into being, object by object, idea by idea.
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Understanding Art Deco Rugs: Modernism, Luxury, and Timeless Style
Few rug styles have influenced twentieth-century interior design as profoundly as Art Deco rugs. Emerging during one of the most transformative periods in modern cultural history, these carpets embodied the optimism, innovation, and cosmopolitan sophistication that defined the Art Deco movement. More than decorative floor coverings, Art Deco rugs became expressions of a new visual language—one rooted in modernity, luxury, architecture, and artistic experimentation. Unlike traditional Persian carpets that emphasized centuries-old motifs and weaving conventions, Art Deco rugs embraced a distinctly modern perspective. Their compositions drew inspiration from architecture, industrial design, fine art, fashion, travel, and technological progress. The result was a new generation of carpets that transformed the role of textiles within contemporary interiors.
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Navajo Rugs: History, Art, Design & the Legacy of Diné Weaving
Navajo rugs occupy a singular position within the history of American textile art. Woven by Diné artists across the American Southwest, these textiles represent far more than a regional decorative tradition. They embody generations of knowledge surrounding sheep, wool, spinning, natural materials, color, geometry, landscape, community, and cultural continuity. From nineteenth-century blankets to the celebrated regional rugs of the early twentieth century—and from Two Grey Hills and Ganado to sophisticated contemporary works—Navajo weaving has continually demonstrated the ability of textile art to function simultaneously as cultural expression, design, craftsmanship, and fine art.
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The House the European Stuycks Kept: Madrid’s Royal Loom, Goya’s Cartoons, and the Spanish Carpet
There is a building in Madrid, a short walk from the Atocha station, where the same craft has been practiced without interruption for more than three hundred years. Its brick and its Neo-Mudéjar arches were raised in the nineteenth century, but the work carried on inside them belongs to a lineage older still, to 1720, when Philip V, having lost the Flemish tapestry workshops of the Spanish Netherlands to the Peace of Utrecht, resolved that Spain would simply make its own. He summoned a family of Flemish weavers, the Vandergotens, to Madrid, and founded the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. Three centuries later, in the presence of the King and Queen of Spain, the factory marked its tercentenary as one of the last places on earth where royal weaving continues by the hand, exactly as it always has.
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Anatolian Rugs: From Seljuk Origins to Contemporary Luxury Spaces
Among the world's most influential textile traditions, Anatolian rugs occupy a singular position in the history of decorative arts. Emerging from the vast cultural landscape of Anatolia—modern-day Turkey—these carpets represent centuries of artistic exchange between Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean world. Few weaving traditions have exercised a greater influence on the evolution of carpet design. From Ottoman palaces and Seljuk courts to Renaissance paintings and contemporary luxury interiors, Anatolian rugs have continuously shaped the visual language of textile art. Unlike carpets associated with a single tribe, city, or dynasty, Anatolian rugs encompass an extraordinary range of regional traditions. The result is a diverse yet interconnected weaving culture characterized by bold geometry, symbolic motifs, sophisticated color palettes, and remarkable craftsmanship.
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A Glossary of Handmade Rugs and Kilims: Understanding Terms, Types and Techniques Past and Present
Referring to the art style characterized by using shape and color withdrawn from traditional repetition or realism. Abstract rugs — sometimes referred to as art rugs — capture an expressive nature that reads as a very modern style, though many abstract rugs draw inspiration from works of the same art style in the mid-century. One of the more widely known mid-century lineages of this style is abstract expressionism, named for the literal "expressionists" of the 1950s. Some of the most notable names behind this style include Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Referring to a lineage of nomadic Persian rugs (sometimes referred to as “Avsar” in the alternate spelling). Afshar rugs hail from the eponymous tribe in the region of Northeastern Iran.
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