Apricot and Slate Blue Alternating Palmette, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk carries the finest work here — the miniature lattice inside each palmette heart is only a few millimetres across, and it needs a crisp edge to read at all. Across the open apricot ground the silk gives a lustre that shifts as you move around the rug.

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 in mixed-fibre rugs. An apricot ground sits at the paler end of the range and, with the field about seventy per cent open, there is little pattern to disguise a mark.

Look into the heart of any palmette on this rug and you will find another pattern inside it. Each fan-shaped motif is built around a small upright lozenge, and that lozenge is not filled with a single colour — it carries a miniature diamond lattice, four or five cells across, drawn at a fraction of the scale of the palmette around it. The rug therefore has three levels of pattern running at once: the rows of palmettes across the field, the leaves fanning out from each one, and this tiny grid at the centre of every single one of them.

The palmettes themselves alternate. One is drawn in slate blue, the next in sage green, and they are offset so that no palmette ever sits beside another of its own colour — a second rhythm laid over the first. All of this sits on an apricot ground that accounts for about half the rug, with the field itself left roughly seventy per cent open. That openness is what makes the layering legible: crowd these motifs together and the miniature lattices would be lost, but given room, each palmette can be read on its own and the detail inside it rewards a closer look.