Crimson Single Column Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. Fitting this many border bands into a rug 70cm wide needs a fine knot; several of the guard stripes are under a centimetre and still carry their own repeat.

At this size the rug will most likely go somewhere with concentrated traffic — a doorway, a bedside, in front of a basin. The crimson ground is forgiving, but the ivory and rose in the güls and the border cartouches will show marks, and they take up a good deal of the surface. Small rugs also creep under foot traffic more than large ones, so a pad or gripper is worth having.

This rug has a front and a back, and the measurements say so plainly. The border at the lower end runs 39.6cm deep; the border at the upper end runs 22.3cm. That is a difference of seventeen centimetres on a rug only 156cm long — the deep end takes a quarter of the whole length, the shallow end a seventh. The side borders, by contrast, are near enough equal at about 21cm each.

So the asymmetry is deliberate and it runs one way only. The deep panel at the foot carries the boldest drawing on the rug — large hooked and stepped devices in ivory and navy, at a scale nothing else here matches — and it is meant to be the end you come to. This matters more on a small rug than a large one: at this size the piece will sit in a doorway, at a bedside or in front of something, and which way round it goes changes what you see first. Everything else is squeezed tight around it. The field is a strip 28cm wide holding a single file of six güls at 15.1cm intervals, and the borders take 75.9% of the rug — three-quarters of the surface is frame.