Red Star Medallion

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with the sides overcast in red and a cream 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 honest caveat on this rug is water. Red is the dye most likely to move if silk gets wet, and here it sits directly against cream all the way round the oval and along both overcast sides. A spilled drink in the field is the one accident to plan around, so keep it away from where glasses are set down, and never try to rinse a mark out yourself.

Ask anyone to name the colour of this rug and they will say red. Measure it and the red ground covers well under a fifth of the surface, while cream covers about a third. The reason is position rather than quantity. The red is all in one place, a single enclosed oval at the centre where the eye lands first, and it is the most saturated colour on the rug. The cream is spread through the corners, the border and the medallion, and broken up by drawing everywhere it appears. You can check it with a sheet of paper: lay it over the oval and what remains reads as a pale, almost neutral rug. It is also why the piece sits easily in a room — the strong colour is contained in the middle, and the edges that meet the floor and the furniture are soft.