Hand-Knotted Persian and Oriental Rugs, Delivered Across Europe
Every rug in this shop is a piece we hold in stock and photograph ourselves. Most are hand-knotted Persian rugs woven in Iran, alongside oriental pieces from Nepal, Pakistan and India, and hand-woven kilims and sumaks in pure wool.
A hand-knotted rug is made by a person, not a machine, so no two are ever quite the same. Every knot is tied by hand, one at a time — around two million of them in a large wool rug — over months of work, sometimes a year or more. City workshops follow a drawn design; village and nomadic weavers work from memory — either way, an authentic piece keeps the small irregularities of the hand that made it. Looked after, a rug like that serves for decades and tends to hold its worth, while a machine-made rug in synthetic fibre is usually worn out and replaced within a few years.
The rug in the photographs is the exact rug that arrives at your door — not one example of a production run. Delivery is door to door and free on every order, and the price on the listing is the price you pay: within Spain and the rest of the EU no import charges arise at all, and for destinations outside the EU — Norway, for example — we cover the import duties and taxes ourselves.
Finding the Right Rug
The collection runs to a few hundred pieces at any one time, most of them Persian rugs for sale, so the filters are there to cut it down to the handful that suit your room. You can narrow by:
- Size — from small kilim mats around 65 cm across up to a 250x350 cm rug for the living room. Filter to the centimetre, or start from the size of the room you have in mind.
- Colour — the dominant colours and the highlight tones are recorded separately for every rug, so you can match a piece to a floor or a wall rather than guessing from one photograph.
- Material — most pieces are wool rugs; a smaller group is woven in wool and silk, where the silk catches the light in the pattern; and a handful are pure silk rugs.
- Origin and region — Nain, Kerman, Tabriz, Baluch, Sumak and the other weaving regions, each with its own palette and knotting tradition.
- Style — oriental, modern, vintage, patchwork, kilim and sumak, plain, geometric or floral.
Before you filter, measure the room and fix the shortest and the longest a rug can be; treat those two limits as firm. On everything else it pays to stay a little flexible — these are one-of-a-kind pieces, closer to paintings than to made-to-order goods, and demanding one exact combination of size, colour and pattern can narrow the whole collection to none. When several candidates fit, take the one you keep coming back to: the rug you love outranks its specification.
What Every Listing Tells You
Buying a rug you cannot stand on first only works if the listing is honest about the object. Each one carries the measured dimensions in centimetres and in feet and inches, the pile height in millimetres, the knot density, the weight, the materials in the pile and the foundation, and the weaving region. The photographs are of that rug, in daylight, including the back — where the knots of a genuinely hand-knotted piece are visible, the pattern reads almost as sharply as on the front, and the fringes run out of the foundation itself rather than being sewn on.
Read the knot density the way the Persian carpet trade does: a high count lets a finely drawn pattern stay sharp, the way more pixels sharpen a photograph, but it is no ranking on its own — bold geometric designs do not need it, and famously durable carpets such as Heriz and Bijar carry modest counts. Quality lives in several things at once: material, colour harmony, symmetry and condition — so weigh the whole listing rather than a single number.
If you already own an oriental rug and want to know what it is worth, our rug valuation service works from photographs you upload, wherever you are.
