Default Rugs
- Under 6 x 9
- Runners
- 6 x 9
- 8 x 10
- 9 x 12
- 10 x 14
- 12 x 15
- Over 12 x 15
Origin ▼
Style ▼
Material ▼
Width
Length
To connect with a specialist, click here
Stories from the Default Archive
Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.
The Artists Behind European Tapestry: A Guide to the Names Worth Knowing
There is a persistent misconception about tapestry, and it is worth correcting at the outset: that the weaving is the whole of the art. It is not. Behind every great European tapestry stands an artist, the author of the design from which the weavers worked, and the history of the medium is in large part the history of these figures. To collect tapestry seriously, or simply to understand it well, is to know their names. What follows is a guide to the artists who matter most, arranged as the tradition itself unfolded, from the royal workshops of the old regime to the modern revival that made tapestry, once again, one of the most ambitious art forms in the world.
Read the Feature
The Long Life of a Green: On Celery, Color of the Year, and the Four Centuries of Weaving That Anticipated It
Every year, the color world makes its pronouncement, and every year the design world turns to see what it has been given. For 2027, Sherwin-Williams has named Celery; a light, airy, herbal green with a yellow undertone, chosen, in the company's words, for a moment that prizes wellness, balance, and connection. It is a soft color with a quiet glow and a faint edge; it pairs, its makers note, with white for something breezy, with cranberry red for something playful, with brown for something elevated. It is, by any measure, a beautiful and intelligent choice. It is also a color the great weavers of the world have understood for four hundred years.
Read the Feature
Provenance, Structure, Intelligibility: The Three Pillars of Serious Collecting
Anyone can acquire a rug. To collect one, to bring it into a serious collection with the confidence that it belongs there, requires a discipline, and that discipline rests on three questions. Across four decades of building one of the most significant archives in the country, this house has come to evaluate every object through the same three. They are the difference between buying and collecting, and they are worth setting down plainly, because they apply as readily to a Safavid fragment as to a signed Aubusson, and because they are the same three questions, at bottom, that a curator at the Metropolitan or a specialist at Christie's brings to any object of consequence.
Read the Feature
What Makes Tibetan Wool the Gold Standard for Custom Rugs
Every great rug begins long before the loom. It begins on the animal, in the place, in the particular conditions that made the fiber what it is. And among all the wools that have ever been spun into a carpet, few can rival the wool of the Tibetan highlands, a material whose superiority is not a matter of marketing but of altitude, climate, and the unhurried logic of the natural world. The sheep of the Tibetan plateau live at elevations that would defeat most living things, thin air, brutal cold, a growing season measured against a sky closer than it has any right to be. Nature's answer to that severity is the fleece. To survive the plateau, the animal must grow a wool of exceptional density and, crucially, of exceptional lanolin content; the natural oil that coats each fiber, repels water, resists soil, and lends the finished yarn a luster and resilience that lowland wools cannot approach. What is hardship for the animal is a gift to the weaver.
Read the Feature
Time, Labor and the Lasting Value of the Handmade Rug
There is a question that hovers, unspoken, over every fine handmade rug: why does it cost what it costs? It is a fair question, and it deserves a serious answer, one that has nothing to do with markup and everything to do with time. So, what a hand-knotted carpet actually is? It is a surface built one knot at a time, each knot tied individually by hand around the threads of a loom, by a weaver working with a knife and a pile of dyed wool. A fine carpet of substantial size contains not thousands of these knots but hundreds of thousands, in the very finest pieces, more than a million. A skilled weaver, working steadily, ties a few thousand in a day. The arithmetic is unforgiving and it is illuminating: a great large carpet represents not months of labor but years, sometimes the sustained effort of several weavers working in concert across the turning of seasons.
Read the Feature
Every Great Collector Owns a Library: On Books, Rugs, and the Knowledge That Connects Them
There has always been a quiet kinship between the rug and the book. Both are objects one lives with rather than merely owns. Both reward the patient return, disclosing more on the tenth encounter than the first. Both are, at their finest, repositories of a civilization's memory; the one held in language, the other in wool. It should surprise no one that the greatest collectors of carpets have almost always been, in the same breath, collectors of the books that explain them. J. Paul Getty kept a scholar's library beside his objects. The Rothschilds, whose carpets now rest in Doha and whose names still move a saleroom, understood a collection as a thing to be studied as much as displayed. To acquire seriously has always meant to read seriously.
Read the Feature
