Magenta and Navy Hereke Floral, 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 rose ground hides everyday marks reasonably well, and the navy border better still. The cream in the flowers is the vulnerable colour — it is the palest thing here and the first to grey, and because the design depends on its many colours staying distinct from one another, it is worth keeping clean rather than letting it dull.

This is a Hereke floral, the style of the imperial Turkish workshops founded at Hereke on the Sea of Marmara in the nineteenth century to supply the Ottoman court. Its mark is curvilinear drawing: stems that arch and turn rather than stepping along the knot grid, palmettes with rounded lobes, leaves that curl back on themselves. Achieving those curves takes a fine knot count, which is why the tradition is associated with small, closely woven pieces like this one rather than with large coarse rugs.

Count the colours and the number is surprising for something the size of a bath mat. Measured across the whole surface, six separate colour families each hold three per cent or more — rose, gold, near-black, cream, pink and blue — and the two largest together account for only two-thirds of it. Most small rugs work with a ground and two or three accents, because at this scale more than that turns muddy. Here every spray is outlined, so each colour is fenced off from the ones beside it and none bleed together at a distance, and the stems arch in mirrored pairs either side of the centre line, giving the eye a path through what would otherwise be a crowded field. Fold the rug down its length and the two halves answer each other spray for spray.