Bright Red Turkmen Gül Rug, Hand-Knotted Wool

100% hand-spun Afghan wool, naturally rich in lanolin, which gives it softness, a subtle sheen and a natural resistance to everyday dirt and spills. Hand-knotted with a camel fringe at both ends.

About as practical as a rug gets. Just over one-tenth of one per cent of the surface is pale enough to count as neutral and the whole piece sits in one deep madder register, so there is essentially nothing here for a mark to spoil. The trade is lint: a rug this saturated shows pale fibres and pet hair well before it shows soiling. Bear in mind that the deep borders take the traffic — they are where people step on and off, and they carry most of the drawing.

The frame on this rug is very nearly as wide as the picture inside it. The two side borders measure 48.8cm and 47.5cm, and the field between them is 103.8cm across. Put the borders together and they come to 96.3cm — within eight centimetres of the field's own width. Across the whole surface the borders take 62.5% and the field 37.5%.

That is a deliberate proportion rather than a shortage of nerve. On a rug 200cm wide it leaves a panel of güls barely a metre across, which changes what the rug is: not a carpet with a trim around it, but a framed panel, closer in feeling to a woven hanging than to a floor covering. It also concentrates the fine work. The gül field is one pattern repeated; the borders carry six or seven different ones, stacked, each with its own repeat and its own scale. Most of the variety in this rug is in the part that most rugs treat as an afterthought.