Before you order
Ask for a sample.
In a store where nothing exists until you order it, and where every piece is made to order, the sample is not a nicety. It is the part of the process that makes the rest of it honest.
What you receive
A piece of the real thing. The same wool, dyed the same way, knotted or tufted at the same density, finished the same. Everything about it except its size is true of the rug you would receive.
That makes it the only honest answer to the two questions a screen has never been able to answer: what colour is this, actually, and what does it feel like underfoot.
How to read one
Put it on the floor
You will only ever see this rug from above, at a shallow angle, with the pile lying away from you. Colour judged at eye level on a table is not the colour you will live with.
Look twice, in two lights
Once in daylight, once under the lamps you actually use in the evening. A warm bulb pulls greys towards brown and blues towards grey. If the two readings disagree strongly, choose for the light you use the room in.
Press it, then let go
A dense pile springs back. A loose one stays flat. That recovery is what keeps a rug looking well in five years, and it is invisible in every photograph ever taken.
Hold it against your own things
Your sofa, your floor, your wall. Never against a white desk. Colour has no absolute value, only a relationship to whatever sits next to it.
Judge them one at a time
Two samples compared side by side exaggerate their difference and you end up choosing on contrast rather than on fit. Look at each on its own.
What a sample cannot do
It cannot show you scale. A hand-sized square of a large-scale pattern tells you nothing about how that pattern reads across a room.
It cannot promise an exact match, because your rug will be dyed in its own batch. It cannot show you wear, which is predicted by construction and fibre rather than by a swatch.
And it will fade if you leave it on a windowsill, which then misleads you when you compare it a year later. Keep it out of the sun.
Ask
Tell us the piece, the colours you are choosing between, and the room they are for. The more you tell us about the room, its light, its floor and what else is in it, the more useful the samples we send will be.
Or write directly to living@raheemandson.com.
Questions
How do I get a sample?
Write to the store with the piece and the colours you are weighing up, and the room they are for. Samples are cut from the actual yarn and finished at the actual density rather than printed.
Will my rug be exactly the colour of the sample?
Very close, and not identical. Yarn is dyed in batches and no two batches land on precisely the same value. Judge a sample on colour family and tone, not on an exact match.
How should I look at a sample?
On the floor, in the room it is for, in daylight and again under the lamps you use at night. Never on a table under a ceiling light, and never against a white desk.
Can a sample tell me how the pattern will look?
No. A hand-sized piece says nothing about how a large-scale pattern reads across three metres. Use the sample for colour and hand, and the photograph and dimensions for pattern.