Ivory and Chestnut Turkmen Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Sherwan

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 in northern Afghanistan with an ivory fringe and a woven elem panel at each end.

Be clear-eyed about the ground. An ivory field is the least forgiving surface in this tradition, and here it is not a narrow margin but half the field — open, undrawn and pale. Everything that would vanish into a red Bokhara will show on this one. The compensation is that the borders are a mid-toned dusty taupe rather than another light colour, so the edges where people step on and off are considerably more robust than the middle. At more than ten square metres this is a heavy rug; plan how it will be moved before it goes down.

This rug has a twin. Its consecutive SKU, a wine-red piece of the same design, was measured with the same method, and the two agree on nearly everything. Both have a field exactly 168cm wide. Both have side borders of 59.5cm and 52.5cm. On one the borders take 58.4% of the surface, on the other 58.5%. The gül columns sit on a pitch of 32.6cm against 33.3cm, and the rows on 17.2cm against 16.5cm — differences of two to four per cent, which is inside what hand-weaving varies by anyway.

So the two were built to one plan and separated only by the dye pot. That is worth knowing for two reasons. It tells you the workshop was working from a fixed cartoon rather than improvising the layout, which is unusual enough in tribal weaving to be a mark of a careful production. And it means the ground colour is the only real variable between them — the same emblems, the same spacing, the same frame, once on deep wine and once on ivory. The difference that makes is not small. On the red version the güls sit only a step away from their ground and the field reads as continuous. Here half the field is open ivory, the chestnut emblems stand clear of it, and the same design reads as a set of discrete objects rather than a texture.