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August 5, 2019August 5, 2019

Steal the Look: Lifestyle Hotels Love To Use Vintage Rugs

Handmade Rugs - vintage rugs - Oriental Rugs

The hospitality industry, particularly the restaurant and hotel sectors, is increasingly fixated on providing authentic, handmade, unique, and narrative or “story-led” environments. Key to the success of these new environments (often labelled as “lifestyle”) are handmade vintage rugs which have become “go-to” global hospitality features. We look at how four new hip hotels – one in the US, one in Scotland, one in Wales, and one in India – use vintage handmade Oriental rugs so you can steal the look for your home.

Until the last five years or so hotels might use area rugs for guest rooms, but they wouldn’t dream of using area rugs in high traffic areas like lobbies, hallways, and restaurants. High traffic areas were reserved for wall-to-wall carpeting. If you were unlucky in your hotel choice the carpet might resemble the orange, red, and black bold beehive design wall-to-wall carpet in horror movie classic The Shining. Or if you were lucky and stayed in a hotel like the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris during the noughties, you would have discovered luxurious wall-to-wall wool carpet featuring Madonna’s pixellated face in the hotel’s bar. Although wall-to-wall carpet hasn’t disappeared, new hip hotels are opening across the globe that feature natural fiber handmade new and vintage rugs in guest rooms as well as public areas. We take a look at four of these.

The Dream Hotel, Nashville

Country music capital of the world, Nashville is a city with characterful historic buildings. Opened in March 2019, the Dream Hotel is in the downtown historic district. Built behind the restored facades of two historic 19thcentury buildings are reimagined new interiors that build on the existing narrative of the site of a former hotel and saloon. The hotel’s designers used jewel-like hues of red and blue for guest room color schemes which are enhanced with Oriental rugs and overdyed Oushak rugs. Low contemporary seating in the striking black and white checkerboard reception is anchored by two vintage Oriental rugs, a 10’x14′ and a 9’x12′ layered at right angles over the larger rug. Enhanced by strategic lighting, the rug colors bounce off the optical orange reception desk creating a striking design.

The Fife Arms, Braemar, Scotland

Built in 1856, this mid-size traveller’s hotel peaked in the 19thcentury then languished until it was purchased in the 21stcentury by an international art power couple. Like the Dream Hotel, the architecture and setting of the hotel in the Scottish Highlands provided the storyline for decor. The new owners built on the history to create a narrative environment rich with visual puns, contemporary art, twists on tartan (or plaid as we know it in America!) patterns, all underscored with a collection of vintage Oriental rugs. One of the contributors to the interior design said that every object in the hotel is “a clue waiting to be read”, and those of us who love vintage Oriental rugs know that the patterns are rich with clues waiting to be read. Unlike the Dream Hotel, the vintage Oriental rugs in The Fife Arms aren’t layered in a contemporary way, but centered beneath traditional armchairs and sofas to create distinct yet connected public seating areas, and small zoned areas in bedrooms.

The Grove, Narberth, Wales

Much smaller than The Fife Arms, the Grove is a 17thcentury stone house remodelled in the 19thcentury to include Arts and Crafts and Gothic Revival features popular at the time. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement which championed the handmade, the newly converted house-into-hotel features not vintage Oriental rugs throughout the property, as well as vintage handwoven textiles hanging on the walls. The rich visual handmade Arts and Crafts look created by the hangings and rugs is a look that can be easily translated into your home.

Soho House, Mumbai, India

Although it’s a members club and hotel and not open to the general public, the interior design of the newest outpost of the global members club Soho House is focused on traditional Indian craft and textiles with Oriental carpets used throughout the interior design. We particularly like they way they’ve used rugs in the seating area adjacent to the bar. A long narrow pier table divides the space. Seating either side of the dividing table seem identical, but look closer and you’ll see the areas aren’t identical twins. The two large rugs that anchor each area are the give-away. A patterned low pile rug on one side and a geometric tribal flat weave on the other side balance the look while allowing each area to be unique.

Let Us Help You Find the Perfect Rug

The rug ideas from these hotels are easily transferable to your home. Need suggestions or help? Let us help you curate your home to reflect your unique narrative with our selection of hand-knotted and handwoven rugs made with natural fibers. Visit us at our showroom near Manhattan, or schedule a video call from anywhere in the US, and our rug experts will be happy to take you on a virtual tour during your free consultation.

July 10, 2019August 5, 2019

Make a Meditation Space: Rugs for Mindful Living – 4 Tips

Oushak Influence Pure Silk With Oxidized Wool Hand-Knotted Oriental Sample Rug

Creating a space in your home dedicated to mindfulness and meditation (which can be as simple as stroking your cat, it doesn’t have to mean mantras or spiritual chakras), is no longer a luxury but a necessity in today’s chaotic world. You don’t need a big space and you don’t need to spend lots of money. All you need is a rug to define that space as “sacred” and to anchor your meditation. Some people think the meditation space trend is recent, but it started two decades ago when writer Sarah Susanka founded the “Not So Big” movement in architecture and home design after she zoned a space in her attic for a meditation haven.

For those of us in small homes and apartments, a small area rug can be the meditation space “anchor” and the physical symbol of your meditation space. The rug can be moved around as necessary and rolled up like a yoga mat between sessions. Soon you will learn to associate unrolling the rug with mindfulness. Aim to spend at least ten minutes a day sitting in your space on your rug. Build this into a habit.

The key to happiness is finding inspiration in life’s little things. Susanka echoes famous English designer William Morris when she says you need to create a space that is “an expression of useful beauty”. Few things are more indicative of “useful beauty” than a beautiful handmade rug. And what better to ground your meditation than with a rug? Here are our four tips for making your meditation space.

Tip 1: Locate your meditation space

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. In other words don’t wait until you have the perfect space in the perfect home! You can make a meaningful meditation space in any home and with a limited budget. Let this be your goal – to make a perfectly imperfect meditation space now even if your “space” is a small rug you unroll daily.

If you store your rug between sessions don’t fall into the trap of “out of sight, out of mind”. Scientists say it takes around two months to make an automatic habit. Keep a daily journal to record your meditation sessions. Use your journal to inspire you to maintain your momentum until unrolling your rug for meditation becomes a daily habit.

Tip 2: Choose a natural fiber rug

A healthy rug is a rug that is friendly to the environment and to human health. Wool is a natural, renewable fiber. Wool is biodegradable. Wool is stain resistant and fire retardant. With basic home care, a wool rug will last a lifetime. Your meditation area should be a physically healthy place to induce healthy thinking, which is why we recommend handmade wool rugs. Machined rugs made from synthetic fibers will “off-gas” toxins which means they continue to produce residual chemical signatures in your home. You definitely don’t want that in your home or your meditation space.

Tip 3: Choose your rug shape and size

If you have a large space or a dedicated room for your practice, then great – choose whatever rug suits your space. But for those of us in small homes who may need a mobile meditation space, we recommend you find a hand-knotted or handwoven sample rug (called a “strike off” by design professionals) which come in sizes as small as 2 x 2 feet. Samples are created for showrooms to allow more patterns and weaves to be displayed. They’re also created for clients who want a bespoke design. Either way they are a great way to get a beautiful and healthy meditation area rug at a very affordable price.

For those in larger spaces consider choosing a hand-knotted or handwoven round rug. The Ensō Circle in Zen Buddhism expresses the moment when the mind is free to let the body create. It symbolizes enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and is a perfect rug shape for a meditation zone.

Tip 4: Include plants and daylight

Try to locate your meditation area in a spot near natural daylight, perhaps next to a window or beneath a skylight. Buy a green plant – or several – to add Mother Nature and her natural wellness to your space. Scientists believe sunlight increases serotonin in the body which is a healthy hormone that helps create positive emotions. Living, breathing plants help create a healthy home environment by helping to combat indoor air pollution which in turn helps you feel positive emotions.

Meditation and mindfulness can allow you to understand and embrace the idea that living life “large” is not dependent on the size of your home, but is a product of mindfulness and gratitude, both of which will evolve from a meditation practice.

June 27, 2019August 5, 2019

Wool: One of the Best Fibers for Rugs

We believe in the importance of natural materials for all of the hand-knotted and hand loomed rugs we sell. Natural materials are sustainable because their source can be replenished and the product itself can be recycled. Machine-made rugs are often (but not always) made with synthetic fibers which can dramatically lower the price point but at what cost to the environment and human health? We believe it’s a false economy to buy cheap mass-produced rugs which are often treated as short-life, “fast fashion” to quickly become one more example of our unsustainable throwaway economy. This blog champions quality, long-lasting handmade artisan rugs made from wool.

Rug Foundations: Cotton

Did you know that many 100% wool rugs usually include cotton? This isn’t deceptive advertising. “Pure” wool fiber rugs are described as “pure” and “100%” because the fiber that you see and walk on is the “pure” element, but beneath it is a cotton foundation.

There are exceptions of course (some makers do use wool fiber foundations) as there are historically hundreds of traditional local, regional and tribal techniques to weave a rug, but in general for the new hand-knotted rugs we sell, the warp and the weft foundation is made from dyed or undyed cotton fibers. This cotton matrix is the base for thousands of intricate knots created with the “face fiber” (e.g. wool, silk). The “face fiber” creates the visible field and pattern. These face knots hide the cotton matrix although experts can spot “dots” within the rug pattern which reveal where cotton strands were knotted after a break or where the length of a warp or weft was increased. There is no way to predict how many or how few cotton knots may appear in any rug, but it is both a sign and a signature of a truly handmade artisan rug.

Wool

Our wool rugs are made with sheep wool rather than from the fleece of other animals like goats whose fleece can be spun into a wool-type product. Wool is not a monoculture, which means that all wool is not created equal. There are hundreds of breeds of sheep although sheep that produce wool for rugs fall into fewer breeds. Even within these breeds wool quality is determined by many factors which include country of origin, habitat and diet. Wool takes dye easily, but so too undyed wool comes in a variety of natural colors which can be woven into striking, natural rug patterns.

Good quality wool is hard-wearing, naturally anti-bacterial and anti-microbial and inherently flame resistant. It’s easy to clean too. Nevertheless it’s a good idea to reduce wear to the pile by using one of our dual-sided natural rubber pads underneath to reduce foot friction and to keep the rug safely in place. Regular vacuuming is also recommended to keep dirt from embedding in the pile.

While many experts insist that wool rugs must be professionally cleaned (which is never a bad idea), did you know that Nordic countries are known to recommend cleaning wool rugs with snow? Finnish textile company LapuanKankurit reported in 2019 that when snow blankets the country, Finns gather up their wool rugs and wool blankets and take them outside on a cold, clear winter day to clean them with snow. This is an especially good way to clean wool rugs as over-use of water can encourage mold growth. Snow is dusted over rugs and brushes, brooms, or mittened hands “scrub” the surface after which rugs are laid on a non-snow covered surface to dry. We realise this may not be an option for everyone, but if you live in a snowy environment, why not give it a try!

Oxidized Wool and Silk

While a pure wool rug is the most popular fiber choice for our consumers, the tactile, textured “high and low” pile artisan “oxidized” wool and silk rugs we make are increasingly popular. Oxidized rugs provide the best of two worlds as they can look simultaneously vintage and contemporary due to oxidation, color palette, and fiber mix.

Natural oxidation occurs when a rug is exposed to daylight over a long period of time. Mother Nature naturally lightens and alters the rug’s dyes and the pile to create the vintage look so many of us love. Our artificial oxidation accelerates the look provided by Mother Nature. We carefully wash hand-knotted wool and silk rugs with a proprietary solution that reduces the wool pile while retaining the full height of the silk pattern to create a subtle 3D relief surface with a contemporary vintage look.

Wool: the Final Word

The history of humanity is tied to wool. Wool is a sustainable yet irreplaceable resource that we should love and respect for its ability to keep us warm and happy. Handmade wool rugs tread lightly on the land and produce a lower carbon footprint than most competing fibers. We love wool and we hope you do too.

June 27, 2019August 5, 2019

Antique, Vintage, and New Rugs: Which Category is Right for You?

Definitions:

Rug professionals say a new rug becomes vintage when it is twenty years old, and a vintage rug becomes antique in 80 to 100 years (the exact timeline differs from dealer to dealer). Does this mean every new rug has the potential to become a vintage rug and antique rug? No. Not every new rug becomes vintage, and even fewer become antique. Here’s why.

Many rug dealers have restrictions on what type of vintage rugs enter their stock and which eventually becomes an antique. The baseline criteria for vintage and antique is they must be handmade, either hand-knotted or hand-woven. A high Kpsi – knots per square inch – is often a standard criteria for awarding the antique label. Fewer knots per square inch may mean the rug is still beautiful and valuable but it remains in the more affordable vintage category. Rarity of colors and pattern can also boost a vintage rug into antique. Antique rugs are usually expensive.

Although we do stock a selection of antique rugs, our post focuses on the virtues and affordability of the wide range of new and vintage hand-woven and hand-knotted rugs we stock at Shahbanu Rugs.

Hand-woven and hand-knotted new rugs versus machine-made new rugs:

At Shahbanu Rugs we stock only hand-woven and hand knotted rugs. Handmade rugs are the rugs that change categories from new to vintage to antique. We design our new rugs based on classic and new patterns with colorways that reflect contemporary tastes. Because Shahbanu Rugs new rugs are always knotted or woven by hand in environmentally-friendly materials like wool and silk, our rugs age beautifully and allow you to pass them on to the next generation as vintage and beloved family heirlooms.

Machine-made rugs are often made of environmentally unfriendly materials. Their quality is poor and their lifespan is short. We believe in the value of handmade and being an environmentally-friendly rug company. We support our values by stocking only handmade rugs made from natural fibers. The irony of machine-loomed rugs is that quite often a beautiful vintage rug is less expensive per square foot than an equivalently sized machine-loomed rug.

A few facts will help you decide between choosing a new or vintage rug:

Don’t let anyone convince you that once a new rug becomes vintage it becomes unaffordable. Or that new rugs are better than vintage or vice versa. Each category has its virtues. Often vintage rugs will be less expensive than a similar new rug. It sounds confusing, but once you know a few facts you will be able to decide which one is right for your home.

Quality of materials, handmade techniques, plus pattern and color are all used to determine the price of a rug whether new or vintage.
How many rugs exist of a particular type also determines price. For example, “design-art” rugs are woven in limited editions and are often designed by a famous artist or designer. Their quality and scarcity drives up the price. We don’t stock limited edition new rugs at Shahbanu Rugs, so if you find the new rug of your dreams on our website but it’s sold, chances are we can reweave it for you and even change the colorway.
While vintage rugs are a finite resource, this doesn’t mean scarcity is a factor in their price. So many rugs have been woven during the last century that the supply of vintage rugs seems almost inexhaustible.
We advise you to be guided by color and pattern. Our new rug collections are modelled on traditional Persian rugs, the ever-popular Arts and Crafts movement, and contemporary abstract collections and more. The colorways of each collection are carefully attuned to contemporary tastes and trends.
We keep a close eye on design trends and use these trends to guide our vintage rug purchases. Sometimes we decide that particularly busy and colorful traditional patterned rugs (as opposed to tribal and geometric rugs which are popular in their original state particularly for those who love maximalism and jungalow trends) are too overpowering for contemporary interiors. To save these good quality handmade rug from landfill, we overdye the rugs using monochrome colors that produce a vibrant, saturated rug where the pattern recedes and the color takes center stage. These color-rich monochrome rugs are perfect for minimalist interiors.
Another myth to bash is that size is directly equivalent with price. While this maxim is usually true for new handmade rugs, it isn’t necessarily true for vintage rugs where a large vintage rug is not necessarily more expensive than a smaller rug.

The bottom line? If you are buying from Shahbanu Rugs inventory of more than 10,000 handmade rugs, you don’t need to worry about quality because handmade quality is evident in each and every one of our rugs. We recommend you base your decision on price point, color and design.