Taupe and Pink Three-Colour Saf, 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 — a mid-range Pakistani quality, fine enough to keep the small comb devices edging each niche crisp.

A pale taupe ground is less forgiving than a dark or red rug: footmarks and vacuum tracks show more readily across the open areas between the niches. The gold niches are the palest of the three and will grey first, which would break the rotation visually before the other two are affected.

This is a saf — a communal prayer rug carrying a row of mihrab niches rather than a single one, so that several people can use it side by side. What is worth counting here is the colour. There are nine niches, and their grounds run gold, sage green, pink, gold, sage green, pink, and so on to the end: a strict three-colour rotation repeated three times, with no niche ever adjacent to another of the same colour and no substitution anywhere in the sequence.

That is a harder discipline to keep than it sounds. Each niche is woven in turn from one end of the rug to the other, and by the time the weaver reaches the ninth the first is more than a metre and a half behind and long since rolled out of sight on the loom. Holding a three-step cycle across that distance means counting rather than looking. Check it yourself from either end and you will find the rotation unbroken — and note that nine divides exactly by three, so the sequence finishes complete rather than being cut off mid-cycle at the border.