Rose Turkmen Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Sherwan

100% hand-spun Afghan wool, naturally rich in lanolin, which gives it softness, a subtle sheen and a natural resistance to everyday dirt and spills. Hand-knotted in northern Afghanistan with an ivory fringe and a woven elem panel at each end.

The pale ground is the practical consideration. This is a considerably lighter rug than most Turkmen weaving and it will not hide marks the way a deep madder ground does. Two things work in its favour: the field is densely drawn, so there is pattern almost everywhere to break up anything that lands on it, and the borders are woven a clear step darker than the field, which helps where people step on and off. At more than ten square metres this is a heavy rug; plan how it will be moved before it goes down.

A Turkmen gül rug is normally a light pattern on a dark ground. Madder red, near enough to black in shadow, with the emblems picked out above it in ivory and pale wool. This one runs the other way. Its ground sits at 149 on the nought-to-255 brightness scale — a rose rather than a madder — and once the drawing is separated from the ground and measured, 79% of it is darker than the field it sits on. The güls are figures cut out of a pale surface, not lights placed on a dark one.

That is not simply what happens when you lighten the dye. The weaver had to re-choose the whole palette to keep the contrast: on a deep-red version of this same design the proportion runs the opposite way, with two-thirds of the drawing lighter than its ground. Swap the ground and leave the motif wools alone and you get a rug where the pattern barely separates from the field. Here the chestnuts and indigos have been brought forward to do the work the ivory does on a dark rug, and the ivory has been demoted to an accent. It gives the piece a lighter, more open character than the tradition usually allows, and it is the reason a rug this large does not weigh down a room the way a madder-ground carpet of the same size would.