Round Rugs

Round rugs are rarer than square ones and there are two quite different things sold under the name. One is woven round, with the design drawn for a circle and the edge built as the weaving proceeds. The other is a rectangle cut to a circle and bound afterwards. They are not worth the same, they do not wear the same, and the difference is visible in about four seconds once you know where to look.

Why a circle is hard to weave

On a vertical loom the warps run straight and parallel. To weave a circle the weaver has to shorten every row as the shape narrows, and build a finished edge diagonally across the warps as it goes, with no selvedge to work against. It is slow, it is skilled, and it cannot be done at all on a simple village loom. That is why woven-round rugs come almost entirely from workshops: modern and contemporary production, Chinese weaving, and to-order work from centres such as Tabriz and Kerman.

How to tell the two apart

Look at the border. On a rug woven round, the border follows the curve as a continuous band and the medallion sits dead centre. On a cut rug the border pattern is sliced off wherever the circle crossed it, motifs are half-finished at the edge, and the field pattern runs off in straight lines that the outline then interrupts. Then look at the edge itself. A woven edge is part of the rug; a cut edge carries a stitched or machine-sewn binding over raw knots. That binding is the part that fails, and once it goes the knots at the perimeter start to release.

What that means for buying

A cut and rebound rug is not a fraud, and a beautiful rectangle that had a damaged end and was made into a good round rug is a reasonable object. But it is worth less than a comparable rug woven round, it should be described as what it is, and it needs its binding checked before purchase and watched afterwards. It is also the wrong thing to put in a doorway, where the binding takes the worst of it.

Where a round rug earns its place

Under a round table, where the geometry finally agrees. In a square entrance hall, on a landing, beneath a chandelier, or in a bay. In a child's room, where there is no wrong way to sit on it. The 24-inch clearance rule holds: a round table 4 feet across wants a rug 8 feet across. Expect most stock to be new, expect the sizes to cluster under 8 feet, and expect old examples to be scarce and priced accordingly. The related format is the oval, the easier substitute is a square or a plain rectangle, and small circles belong with the accent sizes. In wool a round rug wears like any other; the shape is the constraint, not the fibre. The full set is at rug shapes.