Ivory and Navy Floral Medallion, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Material: a blend of hand-spun wool and silk on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted using the double knot.

Care instructions

• Vacuum gently on a low setting, avoiding the fringes.
• Rotate the rug every six months for even wear.
• Blot spills immediately, working from the outside in.
• Keep out of prolonged direct sunlight, which the silk is especially sensitive to.
• Have the rug professionally cleaned by a specialist familiar with silk-blend pile.

The Shah Abbasi palmette takes its name from Shah Abbas, the Safavid ruler who gathered Persia's finest weavers into royal workshops in the seventeenth century, and the design built around it is the most formal in the whole repertoire: a continuous scrolling vine carrying palmettes and curved saz leaves, resolving into a single radial medallion at the centre with pendants reaching towards each end. Everything is drawn to answer everything else, so the rug reads as one composition rather than a field with an ornament dropped into it. The silk blended through the pile here does something wool alone cannot — it catches light at a different angle from the wool around it, so the medallion and the palmettes seem to lift and settle again as you walk past. Woven in Pakistan on the double knot, the denser of the two knots used there.