Ivory and Coral Medallion Tabriz, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk is what makes a design this fine possible at this size: it holds a crisp edge on motifs only a few millimetres across, and gives the surface the sheen that separates the drawing from the ground.

Wool and silk shrink at different rates, so this rug must never be washed, steamed or shampooed — any deep clean is a job for a specialist in mixed-fibre rugs. The palette is pale throughout and there is little tonal contrast to disguise a mark, so it is better suited to a low-traffic spot, a bedside or a wall than to a hallway.

This is the Tabriz medallion scheme worked at its smallest useful scale. The full apparatus is here — lobed medallion on the centre line, cusped pendants above and below it, spandrels closing all four corners, a field of scrolling vine between, and a palmette border framing the whole — but it has been fitted into a mat barely two feet across. Nothing has been left out to make it fit; the drawing has simply been made smaller.

That is what the silk is for. At this scale the palmettes and blossoms are a few millimetres across, and a coarser yarn would round them off into blobs; a silk-blended pile holds an edge at a size where wool alone cannot. The palette works the same way — measured, ninety per cent of the rug sits within a single warm orange-gold range, so what separates the medallion from the field is not colour but the way the silk turns the light. Tilt the rug or walk past it and the medallion brightens and recedes. That shift is doing the work that a strong contrasting ground would do on a larger rug.