Crimson and Salmon Diamond Lattice, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted to the 9/16 quality, with a natural fringe at both ends. The grade refers to knots counted per inch in each direction, and at this density it is what keeps the small stars and stepped edges inside each diamond legible.

A crimson ground hides everyday marks well, and because the field is almost entirely covered in pattern there is very little plain surface for a mark to show against — this is among the more practical rugs for a busy room. The cream in the diamonds is the colour that will grey first.

On most lattice rugs the ground is what you see and the drawing sits on top of it. Here it is the other way round. Measured across the field, the stepped diamonds cover about three-quarters of the surface and the crimson only a quarter, surviving as narrow bars where one diamond meets the next. Across the whole rug, borders included, that bright crimson comes to under a tenth of what you are looking at.

Filling a field this completely is a great deal more work than leaving ground open — every square centimetre carries drawing, and at 9/16 that is a very large number of decisions across five feet by eight. It also changes how the rug behaves. A rug with an open ground has somewhere for the eye to rest and reads as calm; this one has nowhere, so it reads as dense and energetic, and the crimson bars between the diamonds do the work that open ground normally would — they are what stop the field turning into a single patterned mass. Look at the lattice and you will see the red is not a background at all but a drawn element in its own right.