Wine Red 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 a cream fringe and a woven elem panel at each end.

This is about as forgiving a rug as the catalogue holds. The census comes back at nearly 98% in the red family, with under one per cent of the surface pale enough to count as neutral, so there is almost no light wool to mark. The ivory in the gül quarters is the exception and it is the colour to protect, since it carries all the internal drawing of the emblems. At more than ten square metres this is a heavy rug; plan how it will be moved before it goes down.

The güls on this rug are not evenly spread. Measured on the repeat itself rather than by counting, the columns sit on a pitch of 32.6cm and the rows on a pitch of 17.2cm, and once the emblems are subtracted the gaps come out at 21.0cm between one column and the next against 7.4cm between one row and the next. The horizontal channels are almost three times the vertical ones.

That disparity changes what the field looks like. A gül design is usually described as a grid, and grids read in both directions at once. Here the emblems are close enough vertically to run together and far enough apart horizontally to stay separate, so the field resolves into five continuous ribbons descending the rug rather than a lattice of individual medallions. Stand at the end of it and the effect is of columns; stand at the side and the rows barely register. The small stepped crosses in the wide channels are doing the work of keeping those ribbons apart — without them, 21cm of open ground between files would read as an interruption rather than as spacing, and on a rug nearly three metres long that would be a long way to leave empty.