Rugs, and where the money goes

A rug is priced by the hour, and the hours are sitting there in the knots. Pattern, region and the story on the swing tag move the figure far less than density and fibre do. What follows is how to read construction from the back, why viscose sold as silk fails in a hallway, and why the rug most people buy for a sitting room is one size too small.

Convert the price of a hand knotted rug into hours and it stops being mysterious. Density is quoted as knots per square inch, or in Persian workshops as raj, and a competent floor rug sits between 100 and 200 KPSI. A three by four metre rug at 120 KPSI carries about two and a quarter million knots. A skilled weaver ties eight to ten thousand in a day. Two weavers on one loom are therefore looking at four to six months of tying alone, before dyeing, warping, washing, clipping and finishing. The narrative printed on the label is worth nothing beside that arithmetic. The back settles the construction in five seconds. A hand knotted rug has no backing at all: the pattern reappears on the reverse at the same resolution as the front, knot by knot, slightly softened, and the fringe is the warp itself running out of the weave. A tufted rug has yarn punched through a stretched cloth with a hand held gun and held there by a coat of latex, over which a scrim is glued. Turn it over and you find canvas, not pattern, and a fringe sewn on as a separate strip. Latex hardens, powders and lets go, so ten to fifteen years is a realistic life, and the shedding in the first year is adhesive failing rather than wool settling. Tufting is not a fraud. It is a different product at a tenth of the labour, and it should cost a tenth. Fibre is the other half. Hand spun wool takes dye unevenly, which is what produces abrash, the horizontal banding people pay for, while machine spun wool is uniform and flatter. Highland wools with high lanolin, Ghazni and New Zealand among them, shed soil and recover from crushing.

Construction and fibre settle what a rug is worth. Size settles whether it works, and this is where the money is actually wasted: a good rug bought too small does less for a room than an ordinary rug bought large enough.

The common failure is the rug that floats in the middle of the floor. A rug belongs under the furniture, not between it. In a sitting room the minimum is the front legs of every seat standing on the pile, which locks the arrangement together, and the better answer is all four legs on with twenty to thirty centimetres showing beyond. That rules out the 170 by 240 stocked in every shop. For a sofa and two chairs, 250 by 350 is the honest starting point and 300 by 400 is often the correct one. Under a dining table the dimension is set by the chair rather than the table: the rug must run at least sixty five centimetres past the edge on every side, or the back legs drop off it each time somebody stands. Underlay is not an accessory. A felt and rubber pad of eight to ten millimetres stops creep, keeps the foundation from grinding against the floor and roughly doubles the life of the pile along a walked line. Rotate the rug end for end once a year, because ultraviolet fades the exposed half and feet compress the same route. Pile height is a use decision and not a quality one: a low, tightly clipped pile holds a fine drawing and takes a chair leg, while a long pile blurs any pattern in it and is a floor covering rather than a design. Scale is the last thing anyone checks and the first thing that goes wrong. A repeat that reads well on a sample board turns to texture at three metres, as the eye stops finding the motif and starts reading the field. That is not always a loss, since a fine Bidjar repeat is meant to dissolve into colour when you stand and reassemble when you sit down on it. The mistake is a large, widely spaced motif in a room where two thirds of the field will sit under furniture. Work out where the sofa lands before you look at the pattern, and buy density and fibre first. Pattern is the part you stop noticing by the third month. The wool is the part underfoot for twenty years.