Madder Red and Ivory Turkmen Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, with a natural fringe at both ends. At this size the rug is light enough to lift and shake out, which is the easiest way to keep it clean.

A deep madder ground is among the most forgiving colours a rug can have and hides everyday marks well. The ivory in the güls is the vulnerable colour — it is the palest thing on the rug, it runs down the centre line, and on a small rug placed in a doorway that is where the traffic crosses. The bold end panels take the heaviest wear of all, being closest to the fringes.

Look at the field and then at the panel across the end, and you are looking at two different colour schemes. The field is disciplined: madder red, ivory, salmon, navy, and essentially nothing else — measured across it, green accounts for well under a tenth of one per cent of the surface. The end panel is another matter. There green runs at around two and a half per cent, and in the outer band above the fringe higher still: roughly forty times the concentration it has in the field. The green has been kept out of the middle of the rug and released at the edges.

The scale changes with it. The drawing in the end panel is far larger than anything in the field — broad diagonal bars and hooked forms several times the size of the devices between the güls — so the rug becomes both bolder and more colourful precisely where it stops. On a small rug laid in a doorway that is the part you meet first and stand on last, and it is worth knowing the effect is deliberate rather than incidental: the quiet, orderly field is doing one job and the ends are doing another.