Amber and Mahogany Medallion Chobi, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. The fine curvilinear drawing — arching stems, rounded palmettes, small paired flowers — needs a closely clipped pile and a high knot count to read, and that is what this construction provides.

A mid-toned gold ground is a reasonable compromise underfoot: not as forgiving as a deep madder red, considerably better than an ivory. The mahogany areas are the most robust part of the rug and they sit where you would want them, at the centre and the four corners. The paler borders are the vulnerable zone — lighter than the field and positioned where people step on and off.

Walk outward from the centre of this rug and the dark wool comes and goes five times. Measured as rectangular rings from the middle to the edge, the very centre is almost clear — barely a tenth of one per cent is dark, because the heart of the medallion is a pale rosette. Move out and the dark climbs to 31%: that is the mahogany body of the medallion. Keep going and it drops to 7% as the gold field opens out. Then up again to 24% for the corner spandrels, down to 10% for the pale border, and up once more to 22% at the outermost bands.

Light, dark, light, dark, light, dark — six alternating zones between the centre and the fringe. This is what a medallion-and-corner layout is actually doing, and it is why the design holds together at a distance where none of the individual flowers can be made out. The eye reads the rings, not the drawing. It also explains why the rug can afford such a dense floral everywhere: with the structure carried by alternating bands of weight, the detail inside each band is free to be as intricate as the weaver liked without the composition becoming unreadable. Worth noting what the dark actually is — it looks like indigo, but sampled it measures a mahogany brown, and blue accounts for none of the rug at all.