Six Room-Making Rugs
Floors are often overlooked in room design, but these standout rugs will make you think twice before opting for nondescript wall-to-wall carpeting or hardwood.
1
After spotting Shanan Campanaro’s bespoke wallpaper for Eskayel, the creative team at Doris Leslie Blau, veterans in carpet making, worked with Campanaro to create seven patterns for a line of handmade rugs inspired by the designer’s original watercolors. To translate the delicate brushstrokes and gradation into makeable designs, the team used higher knit counts rarely employed in modern construction, as well as a range of materials like Chinese and banana silk, wool, aloe, and pashmina. The result is a series of ethereal, Rorschach-esque statement pieces.
2
The new Studio Collection is something like the Rug Company’s answer to prêt-à-porter: a more affordable line (starting at $310) of stunning rugs complete with the label’s signature color and flair. The seven graphic Indian dhurries are all handmade from 100 percent cotton and GoodWeave-certified, meaning they are not produced using child labor and workers are paid fair wages.
3
Not only is this hand-tufted wool rug striking (and amazingly affordable), but its design is an interpretation of a work by Melvin Geisenhofer; he’s an artist at San Francisco’s Creativity Explored, a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with developmental disabilities can create, exhibit, and sell art. A percentage of each sale goes to the organization.
4
Since 1985, Roubini has been collaborating with some of the biggest names in the fashion industry on their spectacular rugs: Missoni, Versace… and now the Tony Duquette company. Duquette died in 1999, but his business partner of 25 years, Hutton Wilkinson, is preserving Duquette’s “more is more” mantra with a line of opulent color-saturated creations like Malachite (left).
5
Venerable manufacturer Odegard teamed up with Ahmad Sardar-Afkhami, principal of Sardar Design, to create this series inspired by Robert Hooke’s 1665 book Micrographia, which explores the uses of the microscope. Each of the wool rugs is produced by a cottage industry in Kashmir that employs elderly men during the winter months who chain stitch by hand using traditional embroidery methods.
6
The 52-rug series from Mansour Modern designer Ben Soleimani runs the gamut from traditional pieces that recall Mansour Modern’s exquisite antiques inventory (Restoration Hardware’s co-CEO Gary Friedman is a fan) to modern creations like Talaa (left), each in Restoration Hardware’s signature muted palette. Soleimani’s exacting standards are present in the unique combinations of angora and looped Tibetan wool and in more unusual materials like cactus and hemp fibers.