Small Area Rugs & Silk Wall Art — Up to 5 × 7 ft

Small rugs — from 60 × 90 cm to about 150 × 200 cm

Small formats are where the finest knotting usually lives. A weaver can spend a year on a piece the size of a tabletop, and at these dimensions the very fine city and silk workshops make sense in a way they never could at room size. The collection runs from rare silk pieces through Persian and Anatolian tribal weaving to small Moroccan Berbers.

Common sizes are 60 × 90 cm, 100 × 150 cm, 120 × 180 cm and 150 × 200 cm. The larger of those will anchor a desk or a reading chair; the smallest are for a hallway, a kitchen, or the floor beside a bed where you put your feet down each morning.

Rugs on the wall

Fine silk pieces are increasingly hung rather than laid, and there is a practical reason as well as an aesthetic one: silk is a beautiful fibre and a poor floor covering. On a wall it keeps its lustre indefinitely, the pattern is seen from the angle it was drawn for, and the surface changes through the day as the light moves across it. A hung textile also takes the echo out of a hard, sparsely furnished room.

If you plan to hang one, do it properly. The standard method is a fabric sleeve sewn along the back of the top edge with a batten slid through it, or a strip of loop-side hook-and-loop tape sewn — never glued — to a linen band, which is itself sewn to the rug. The weight has to be carried along the whole width. Nails, clips and staples through the foundation will tear it, and direct sunlight on a silk pile fades it faster than anything else you can do to it.

What you will find in this size

• Persian silk: Qum, Tabriz and Isfahan, roughly 600,000 to over 1,000,000 knots per square metre
• Turkish silk: Hereke — the Ottoman court manufactory founded near Istanbul in the nineteenth century, and Turkish rather than Persian, though the two are often confused
• Persian tribal: small-format Qashqai, Bakhtiari, Belutch and Afshar pieces
• Caucasian and Turkmen: Shirvan, Kazak and Ersari, often in prayer format
• Berber: small Beni Ourain and Azilal pieces in undyed wool

Living with a small rug — an honest note

Small rugs move. On a hard floor a light piece will travel, ruck up and become something to trip over, so an anti-slip underlay cut a couple of centimetres smaller than the rug is not optional — it is the difference between a rug that stays put and one that annoys you daily.

The other common mistake is buying small for a living room. A 120 × 180 cm rug floating in front of a three-seater sofa makes the sofa look bigger and the room look unfinished; as a rule the front legs of the seating should stand on the rug. If that is your situation, the honest answer is that you need a medium size and not this collection.

And silk underfoot: it is soft, it shines, and it flattens and shows every mark in a walking line. On the floor of a bedroom or beside a chair it is fine. In a hallway or under a dining table it is the wrong material, and wool will make you far happier.

At a glance

• Sizes: approximately 60 × 90 cm up to 150 × 200 cm
• Materials: silk, Kurk and highland wool, undyed Berber wool
• Construction: hand-knotted throughout
• Knot density: from around 120,000 per square metre in tribal pieces to over 1,000,000 in fine silk
• Underfloor heating: suitable
• Label STEP Fair Trade: fair wages, no child labour, monitored working conditions
• Documentation: written assessment of origin, material and knot count with every rug

Care

Vacuum in the direction of the pile with the brush bar switched off; on a small piece it is easy to catch a fringe and pull it out. Turn the rug regularly. Blot spills instead of rubbing, and keep silk away from water and household cleaners entirely — a mark on a silk pile needs a specialist, not a cloth. Hung pieces should be taken down once a year, laid flat and gently vacuumed on both sides. Customers in Germany can use our rug cleaning service in Würzburg, including collection and return in the region; elsewhere we are glad to help you find a specialist nearby.

Related collections

Rugs by size · Qum silk rugs · Runners · Berber rugs · Medium size rugs