Camel and Navy Turkmen Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, with a natural fringe at both ends. Wool is resilient and forgiving underfoot, which matters on a rug this length — it will be walked along its whole run rather than crossed occasionally.

A camel ground sits at the paler, warmer end of the range and is less forgiving than a red or dark rug — the open camel between the güls has little pattern to disguise a mark. On a runner of over four metres, wear is very uneven: the first stretch from the busier doorway takes far more traffic than the far end, so rotating end to end matters more here than on an ordinary rug.

The field is straightforward — one gül repeated down a single column — so the interest is in the borders, and specifically in one thing the main border does. It alternates its ground. A panel of near-black comes first, carrying a large eight-armed star with a salmon rosette at its centre. The next panel along has a salmon-brown ground and carries the same star, but now drawn pale against warm instead of pale against black. Then black again, and so on down the full length.

The motif does not change; only what it sits on. That is a figure-ground reversal, and it does something a simple repeat cannot: the eye reads the dark panels as holes and the light panels as solid, so the border seems to advance and recede as it runs. It is also a way of getting two effects from one drawing, which matters when the border is doing this much work — here it runs seven bands deep on each side, considerably more than the field itself is given. Look along either border and count: black, salmon, black, salmon, without a break.