Ruby Red Diamond Lattice Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. Diaper drawn at two and a half centimetres to the repeat only holds together at a high knot count and a closely clipped pile — on a coarser weave the border would simply blur.

The two halves of this rug behave differently underfoot as well as visually. The ruby field is deep in tone and half covered in drawing, so it is forgiving. The cream borders are the exposure: they run over 44cm deep on every side, they are the palest wool on the rug, and they sit where people step on and off. At more than twelve square metres this is a heavy piece; plan how it will be moved before it goes down.

This rug is drawn at two scales that have almost nothing to do with each other. The field works large: the compartment lattice repeats every 33.9cm across the width and every 22.1cm down the length, and it holds those intervals unusually well — the pattern correlates with itself at 0.76 and 0.77 in the two directions, which for hand-weaving over four metres is close to mechanical. Then look at the borders. Measured the same way, three of the four sides return their strongest repeat at between 2.2 and 2.6cm.

That is a ratio of roughly ten to fourteen to one. The border is not a smaller version of the field, and it is not a frame drawn in the same language at a reduced size; it is a different order of detail altogether, built from bands of diamond diaper so fine that from standing height they read as texture rather than as pattern. The effect is to make the field look bigger and calmer than it is. Set a bold repeat against a surface that reads as woven grain and the bold repeat gains authority — which matters on a rug of this size, where the field has to hold a room on its own. Come close and the borders resolve into hundreds of individual diamonds, and the rug turns out to have been two rugs all along.