Espresso Dome Medallion

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with the sides overcast in dark green and silk fringe at both ends. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

The espresso field hides everyday marks well, but it shows lint and pale threads at once, and the fine ivory lines of the lattice are what wear softens first — once they blur, the dome effect goes with them. The ivory border is the palest part of the rug and the most exposed to spills. This is a piece to hang or to keep at a bedside rather than to walk on.

This design is known as gonbad, the Persian word for dome, and it is a view looking straight up into one. The turquoise medallion is the crown of the dome, and the rings of pointed cells around it are the tiled or carved panels that line its inside. Check it with the rug in front of you: the cells are smallest where they touch the medallion and grow steadily larger ring by ring, until the four in the corners are several times the size of those at the centre. That change in scale is what a dome looks like from below — the panels overhead are furthest away and look smallest, the ones near the rim are closest and look largest — and it is why the field seems to have depth rather than lying flat. The corners, with their open pale blue scrolls, stand in for the pendentives that carry a round dome on a square room. Stand over the medallion and look down, and the effect is at its strongest.