Ivory Arabesque Medallion

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with 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.

A silk rug of this size is best kept out of a traffic path altogether. Used on a table, at a bedside or hung, it will stay as it is for decades; laid in a doorway it will not. The pile shades wherever it is touched, which is normal and brushes back out with a soft cloth in the direction of the pile.

Hold this rug next to a wool one of the same design and the difference is not the pattern but the number of decisions in it. Silk takes a far finer knot than wool, so the same medallion and arabesque can be drawn with several times as many knots across the same distance — which is why the leaves here have serrated edges you can count and the medallion resolves into a dozen separate rings of ornament rather than three or four. The scale follows from that. At this fineness a rug takes so long to knot that large Kashmiri silks are genuinely rare, and pieces of this size are made to be examined rather than walked on. The other thing silk does is refuse to sit still: because the fibre reflects light along its length, the whole surface brightens and dims as you move, and the apricot medallion that looks warm from one side reads almost pale from the other.