About Us —

“We don’t see ourselves as just a rug company; we see ourselves as a design company that makes rugs.”

Yosi Tal, Managing Director & Co Founder Designer Rugs

1986

Eli and Nurit Tal, with their son Yosi, started a hand-tufting studio in a Marrickville factory. Little manufacturing background between them, and one clear conviction: the rugs arriving in Australia deserved better. They set out to make the ones that did.

The work announced itself early. A commission for St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne [confirm occasion and date]. Four rugs for Parliament House for the 1988 Bicentennial. Rugs for Harry Seidler through the years that followed. A reputation for design, built one significant floor at a time.

A design company, from the start

While the 1980s settled into greys and muted pink, Designer Rugs put colour back into the room. Bold where the decade was cautious. That instinct, design leading rather than following, is the through line of everything since.

The rugs were made properly because the design demanded it. Hand tufted in-house, New Zealand wool, local dye houses. The making served the design, never the other way around.

An early large-scale commission on the loom

Forty years of collaboration

The collaborations pushed the work furthest. Painter Alun Leach-Jones and fashion designer Linda Jackson among the first, her Hibiscus and Hacienda now held in the Powerhouse Museum. Since then, Catherine Martin, Akira Isogawa, Dinosaur Designs and Minnie Pwerle, across fashion, fine art, jewellery and architecture.

Yosi Tal with collaborator Akira Isogawa

On record

The Australian embassies in Paris and Tokyo. Laucala Island, Fiji. Emirates One&Only at Wolgan Valley and Hayman Island. Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Westpac Barangaroo, PricewaterhouseCoopers. And the State Theatre in Sydney, where Designer Rugs recreated the original 1928 carpet, a thing not done before.

Forty years on, Designer Rugs is the foremost maker of custom rugs and carpet in Australia, and a design company known well beyond it.

Design begins where you stand.

For forty years, we have begun where every room begins, at the ground. That has always been more than a phrase. It is how Designer Rugs works: outward from the foundation a space is built upon. Four decades of considered design, artistry and collaboration, of making the floor beneath you the heart of everything above. Watch our story unfold.

Where would you like to begin?