Collection: Handwoven Rugs

Look closely at a handwoven rug and you can see the hand in it. A line that wanders by a millimetre, a passage where the tone shifts because one batch of yarn met the next, an edge that is straight without being machine-straight. That variation is not a tolerance we are asking you to accept. It is the reason to buy one, and it is the one thing a factory cannot fake.

Nine in ten of these rugs are wool. Three in four carry no pattern at all. Everything this collection is about sits between those two numbers.

Texture or Drawing: Handwoven Against Hand-Tufted

It is the question we get more than any other, and the answer is shorter than people expect. Handwoven is texture. Hand-tufted is pattern.

The reason is mechanical. A loom builds the surface out of the structure, row by row, which produces depth and relief but makes drawing almost impossible. A tufting gun works the other way round: the maker pushes pile into a backing wherever the design says to, so a flower, a geometric or a sweeping abstract becomes straightforward. Scroll this page and you see plain and tonal surfaces. Scroll the tufted page and you see drawings.

Neither is the better made. Each is made by hand, each is wool almost throughout, and either can be the best rug in a house.

What does change is how they behave. Deeper and softer wins in a bedroom, and that is the tufted side. Lower and firmer wins under a dining table and in a hallway, and that is this side. If the shape you want is round, there are far more of those tufted than woven.

Why So Much of This Has No Pattern

Three quarters plain sounds like a narrow collection until you see what a weave does with a single colour.

The ribs of a woven surface catch light along one axis and release it along the other. Stand at one end of a room and the rug reads warm; walk to the other end and the same rug reads cool. Wool compounds the effect, because wool never takes dye evenly, so what the mill calls one colour turns up on the floor as five or six related tones. An ivory is never a single ivory. A grey has warmth running through it.

The result is that a plain handwoven rug reads as a material rather than as a surface, which is why these sit so comfortably beside oak, linen, plaster and stone. A drawn pattern has to be right for the room. A woven texture simply belongs in it.

Where pattern does appear here it comes out of the weave instead of sitting on top of it. A band of stripes where the weaver changed yarn. A soft geometric built from the structure itself. A Scandinavian line that is really two tones meeting. It stays quiet, and quiet is what survives ten years in a room you use every day.

Woven In, Not Pushed In

The weaver passes the weft through the warp by hand, row after row, so the surface and the structure of a handwoven rug are the same thing. Nothing is glued, and no separate backing holds the pile in place.

You feel that in three ways. The rug is lighter and more flexible than a tufted one of the same size, so it rolls, lifts and lies flat more willingly. It sits closer to the floor, with an edge that vanishes instead of standing up. And it settles rather than flattens as it ages, because the fibre is locked into the weave instead of perched on top of it: where you walk most it takes on a faint sheen, and that reads as patina.

One thing is worth correcting, because it is repeated all over the internet. Handwoven does not mean flat. Many of these have a short woven pile and a few are deliberately long and shaggy. The distinction is not whether there is pile, but how the pile got there.

Where It Goes, and Where It Does Not

Almost every rug on this page suits a living room, and two thirds of them suit a bedroom, a higher proportion than in any other construction we sell. In a living room a plain woven surface anchors the furniture without arguing with it, and because it is low and quiet it will still be right after you have changed the sofa.

Under a dining table this is the construction to pick. Low, firm and dense, with nothing for a chair leg to catch on. A hallway or a kitchen wants exactly those qualities, and a mottled woven surface hides a week of traffic in a way no flat colour manages.

The bedroom needs one honest caveat. A woven wool surface beside a bed is firm under a bare foot rather than plush. Plenty of people prefer exactly that and plenty want to sink in, and no photograph will tell you which of the two you are.

These belong indoors. Wool is the wrong fibre for a terrace, whatever the weather is doing that week.

Colour, Size and Having One Made

The natural end of the range is where this collection runs deepest: oatmeal, sand, putty, stone, soft charcoal, and the greens and indigos that behave the same way across a width. Choose the colour in the light of the room it is going into, because a woven surface shifts more between morning and evening than anything else we sell. That is a pleasure once the rug is down and a gamble beforehand.

Every size we sell exists here, and when you find yourself between two of them, the larger one is almost always right.

Some of this collection is woven to order rather than kept in stock, because that is simply how the weavers who make it work. You get the colour and the dimensions you asked for, and you wait for them. If you are working to a date, tell us and we will steer you to what is already on the shelf. And for a room that fits no standard size at all, the same weavers will make yours to the centimetre, in any width to 400 cm: that is the made-to-measure route.

We have been choosing rugs since 1907, and free EU delivery comes with every order. Come and see us in our rug shop and showroom in Willebroek, in the Antwerp region, easily accessible from Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen and Sint-Niklaas. Give us the dimensions and we will lay a woven surface and a tufted one side by side, so your hand decides instead of your screen.