Madder Red Plain Ghazni, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

Hand-knotted in Ghazni wool, the highland fleece from central Afghanistan, valued for its long staple and natural lustre. The pile is dense and resilient underfoot, and the sheen deepens with use rather than dulling.

A deep red is among the most forgiving grounds a rug can have and hides everyday marks well. The caution with a plain rug is different: there is no pattern to break up vacuum tracks, footmarks or crushing under furniture, so all of those read more clearly than they would on a drawn field. Light shedding is normal with new wool and settles within the first few months.

There is nothing drawn on this rug at all — no medallion, no border, not a single motif. That puts the whole weight of it on two things: the colour and the wool. The red is a deep madder, saturated rather than dark, with enough blue in it to stay a true red instead of drifting towards brown, and it runs unbroken across nearly five square metres.

What there is to look at is at close range. Crouch down and the field resolves into fine horizontal striation — faint lighter and darker lines running the width of the rug, one knot row to the next, where hand-spun yarn varies a little in thickness and in how much dye it takes. It is the opposite of a machine-made plain carpet, which is genuinely flat and looks it. A plain rug is also the hardest kind to weave well: a pattern hides an uneven line or a drifting knot count, and here there is nowhere for any of that to go. Run your eye along the edges and across the surface at a low angle — that is where a plain rug is judged.