Collection: Hand-Tufted Rugs

Somebody drew this. A flower traced from a nineteenth-century archive, a geometric worked out on paper, a wash of colour that shades from one side of the room to the other. Then somebody else put that drawing onto a floor, one tuft at a time, in wool.

That is what separates this part of the collection from the rest of it. Two thirds of these rugs carry a real pattern and only one in ten is plain. If you came looking for a design rather than a texture, you are in the right place.

Where the Patterns Live

Florals are the largest family here, and not the chintz you may be picturing. A good number come out of British design archives, where the original was drawn on paper a century or more ago and has since been redrawn for a floor: stems that interlace, leaves with real structure, colour that somebody thought about for a long time.

Geometrics are almost as many, running from a quiet repeated diamond to a bold graphic grid. Abstracts are the third family, brushed or poured or built from overlapping fields of colour, and they behave more like a painting than a pattern.

Beside those sit the mid-century and retro designs, and the graphic work where a drawing is reduced to two or three shapes and a flat palette. Together they make this the part of the site where something is actually being said.

Plain exists here too, but barely, and that is deliberate rather than a gap. A plain tonal surface is what the handwoven side of the house is for.

How It Is Made, and What That Gives You

A tufting gun pushes strands of wool through a stretched canvas, following the design, thousands of times over. The maker works standing, reading the drawing and filling it in by hand. When the field is finished the back is secured, and the pile is sheared level or carved so that some areas stand higher than others.

Two things come out of that, and you notice both the moment you step on one.

Depth. A tufted pile can be built denser and deeper than a woven one, because it is not held to the logic of a weave. That is why these are the rugs people call luxurious underfoot, and why they suit a room you actually sit on the floor in.

Freedom. The gun goes wherever the design says, so a curve stays a curve, a petal keeps its edge, and two colours can meet on a diagonal. The same drawing on a loom would come out as a staircase.

Nearly all of it is wool, which is what makes the depth worth having. Wool springs back, holds its colour and takes carving without ever looking artificial.

Hand-Tufted or Handwoven

Each is made by hand and each is wool, so the choice comes down to what you want the floor to do rather than to quality.

Take hand-tufted if you want a design and if you want to sink into it. Take handwoven if you want texture, and a firmer, lower surface that steps back and lets the room speak.

The practical part is pile depth. A deep tufted pile is at its best in a living room or in a bedroom. Under a dining table, pick one of the lower, denser tufted qualities instead. And when you want a circle, there are roughly six times as many round rugs tufted as woven, for the simple reason that a loom does not turn corners.

The Rooms

Nearly everything here suits a living room, and most of it suits a dining room as well. That is worth stating plainly, because tufted rugs carry a reputation for being delicate that the modern ones have long outgrown.

The living room comes first, because a pattern earns its keep there. A drawn design gives a room a centre and a palette to build from, and at this depth of pile it is also the most comfortable floor in the house. Bring the seating onto it, as far as the front legs at minimum and further if the room allows.

The dining room next. A tufted rug works under a table provided the pile is low and dense rather than deep and soft, because chairs need to slide rather than sink. Choose on that basis and a patterned rug under a dining table is one of the best-looking things you can do to a room.

The bedroom third, and here you can take the deepest pile in the collection without hesitating. Almost no traffic, bare feet, and a pattern that is the first thing you see in the morning.

Round deserves its own line. Most of our round rugs are tufted, and a round rug with a design drawn to fill the circle is a different object altogether from a rectangle with the corners taken off.

Living With One

Vacuum on suction without a rotating brush bar, dab spills dry rather than working them in, and turn the rug occasionally so light and wear spread evenly. That is the routine, and there is nothing else to it.

A new tufted wool rug sheds for the first weeks. Loose fibre left over from production works its way out, disappears with normal vacuuming and then stops. That is real wool behaving like real wool, not a defect.

For a deep clean, use a cleaner who knows wool and works dry or with low moisture. A tufted rug has a finished back, so it prefers surface cleaning to soaking, and any decent wool specialist knows that before you tell them.

Colour, Scale and Size

Pattern makes size matter more than it does on a plain rug, because a drawing cut in half by a sofa loses the thing you bought it for. Measure first, and where a design is large or centred, go up a size rather than down.

On colour, a patterned rug is the easiest way to set a palette for a room and the hardest thing to add to a room that already holds three patterns. If the walls and the seating are quiet, that is when you can be bold. If they are not, look for a tufted design that reads as texture from standing height, and plenty of them do.

Scale is the detail people misjudge from a screen. A motif that looks modest in a photograph can be forty centimetres across in the room. Check the dimensions on the product page against something in front of you, a tray or a cushion, before you decide.

And when the size you need is simply not there, a good part of this collection can be made to measure, up to 400 cm wide and in any length your room asks for.

We have been choosing rugs since 1907, and every order ships free within the EU. Our rug shop and showroom in Willebroek, in the Antwerp region, is easily accessible from Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen and Sint-Niklaas, and it is the one place where you can put a hand on three different pile depths inside a minute.