Magenta and Teal Jaldar Rosette Gül, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, at a fine gauge, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk carries the highlights and gives the palette its depth; it also means the rug should be treated as a silk piece rather than a wool one for cleaning.

Wool and silk shrink at different rates, so this rug must never be washed, steamed or shampooed — any deep clean is a job for a specialist who handles mixed-fibre rugs. The ivory in the gül centres is the part that will show wear first, and on a runner it sits close to the centre line where the traffic goes.

Everything on this field is drawn on the knot grid. The güls are stepped octagons, the cruciform devices between them are built from right angles, the hooked scrolls turn in square steps, and even the small dark rosettes scattered across the ground resolve into stacked rectangles when you look closely. It is an entirely rectilinear design — which makes the one exception worth finding.

Look into the ivory centre of any gül, past the stepped rings of teal and steel blue that surround it, and there is a small rosette with petals that curve. It is the smallest thing drawn on the rug and the only thing on it drawn as a flower. There is one in every gül, and nowhere else. Whether that was a deliberate reserve or simply the one motif the weaver would not geometrise, the effect is the same: the rug gives you two metres of unbroken geometry and then hides a flower at the centre of each emblem, at a scale you have to crouch to see.