How to Buy a Rug Online Without Ever Standing on It

What a photograph can tell you, and what it cannot

A photograph is reliable about pattern, about scale within the rug, and about the relationship between colours. If a rug reads as three tones of sand with a charcoal line, that is true.

A photograph is unreliable about exact colour, and it tells you almost nothing about hand: how dense the pile is, how it springs back, whether the wool is dry or oily to the touch, how heavy the whole thing is. Those are the qualities that decide whether a rug feels expensive when you stand on it, and no screen has ever transmitted one of them.

So the method is to take everything the photograph is good for from the photograph, take everything it is bad for from the written specification, and take the two things neither can give you from a physical sample.

The six things to read in the specification

Construction. Hand-knotted, hand-tufted, flatweave, handloom. This is the single biggest determinant of price, weight, lifespan and feel. A hand-knotted rug is built knot by knot on a warp and will outlive you. A hand-tufted rug is punched into a backing and is a different object at a different price.

Fibre. New Zealand wool, Indian wool, bamboo silk, jute, cotton, or a blend. Wool is resilient and forgiving. Bamboo silk has a beautiful sheen and marks more easily. Jute is hard-wearing and coarse underfoot.

Pile height. A low pile of six to eight millimetres reads crisp and sits under doors. Fifteen millimetres and up feels plush and will crush under heavy furniture.

Knot density or weight. For hand-knotted, knots per square inch. For tufted and woven, grams per square metre. Higher is denser, heavier, and more expensive.

Backing and finish. What holds it together, and how the edges are finished. Selvedge, binding, fringe.

Size and tolerance. And whether the size can be changed, which in a made to order store it always can.

Order a sample, and look at it properly

A sample answers the two questions a screen cannot: what the colour actually is, and what the pile actually feels like.

When it arrives, do not judge it on a table under a ceiling light. Put it on the floor, in the room, in the position the rug will occupy. Look at it in the morning and again after dark under the lamps you actually use. Put it next to your sofa fabric, your floor and your wall, because colour is always relative to what is beside it.

If you are choosing between two, look at them separately rather than side by side. Two colours compared against each other exaggerate their difference, and you will end up choosing on contrast rather than on fit.

Get the size right before anything else

More rugs disappoint because of size than because of colour, and size is the one thing that is entirely knowable in advance.

Mark the rug out on your floor with masking tape and live with the tape for two days. Walk the route you actually walk. Open the doors. Pull the chairs out. It takes ten minutes and it prevents the most common and most expensive mistake there is.

Because everything here is woven to order, the size is yours to choose rather than one of five boxes to pick from. Sizes and fitting covers the standard relationships between a rug and the furniture around it.