Materials and Construction.
What a rug is made of, and how it is made, decides how it wears.
Materials
Wool
Sheep’s wool has been used in rug making for thousands of years and still sets the standard. Its naturally coiled fibres and lanolin coating resist flame, repel spills, recover from crushing and regulate moisture. Wool absorbs dye deeply, maintaining rich colour for decades. We use New Zealand wool in our hand-tufted rugs and Tibetan wool in our handknotted rug collections.
Semi-Worsted Wool
Semi-worsted wool is combed before spinning. The process strips out shorter fibres and leaves a yarn that is denser and more uniform along its length. That density is what makes it hold an edge. Pile packs tighter, carving stays crisp, and fine linework reads cleanly at close range instead of blurring.We specify it where a design carries detail that has to survive the making.
Silk
Silk is a strong, continuous protein fibre with a triangular structure that refracts light, creating its distinctive lustre and exceptionally rich colour. Although remarkably strong for its weight, silk is more delicate underfoot than wool. It can mark with water, wear faster in high-traffic areas and fade in direct sunlight, so we recommend it only for carefully selected interior spaces.
Hemp
Hemp is one of the strongest plant fibres available to us. It resists damp and it resists mould, which makes it steady in conditions that unsettle softer yarns.
Artificial Silk
Artificial Silk is a filament yarn spun from cellulose, drawn either from wood pulp or from bamboo. It is sometimes sold as art silk. It is not silk, and it does not need to be.
Bamboo Silk
Bamboo silk is a soft, lustrous fibre made from regenerated cellulose derived from bamboo plants. It is hard-wearing while offering a similar sense of luxury underfoot to traditional silk. Its silk-like shine and softness pair beautifully with New Zealand wool, creating elegant highlights and a luxurious finish.
PET
PET has become a modern innovation in rug making, offering the perfect balance between style, durability, and sustainability. Made from recycled materials, PET rugs bring a refined texture and soft feel underfoot while being exceptionally resilient to wear, moisture, and fading. Ideal for both indoor and outdoor spaces.
Shiny Nylon
Shiny nylon is a durable synthetic fibre with a smooth texture and lustrous finish. Its reflective surface adds depth, contrast and a silk-like sheen to rug designs. Hard-wearing and easy to maintain, it pairs beautifully with New Zealand wool, creating elegant highlights while offering softness, resilience and lasting performance.
Undyed Wool
Undyed wool rugs celebrate the beauty of natural fibres in their purest form. Free from synthetic dyes and chemical treatments, they reveal the authentic tones of the sheep’s fleece, from soft creamy whites and warm greys to rich earthy browns and deeper natural hues.
Construction
Hand Tufted
Yarn is punched through a stretched backing cloth with a tufting gun, shape by shape and colour by colour, working to a full-size drawing behind the frame.
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The method suits designs built from defined areas. Geometry, blocked colour, hard edges and carved relief all resolve cleanly, because each area is worked as its own field.
It is faster to make than hand knotting and it costs less at the same size. The trade is longevity. A tufted rug has a bonded secondary backing, and that backing sets the ceiling on how long it lives.
We specify hand tufting for residential work, for commercial installations where the wear rating is matched to the traffic, and for any design where scale and budget rule out hand knotting.
Handknotted
Each knot is tied by hand around the warp and beaten into place, thousands of them to the square metre, working up the loom row by row.
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Nothing else resolves detail this finely. Colour can be graded across a single field, lines can curve without stepping, and organic and painterly designs hold their looseness instead of hardening into shapes.
There is no backing to fail. The structure is the rug. Handled properly, it outlasts the room it was made for.
It is the slowest construction we offer and the most expensive. We specify it where the design demands the resolution, or where the rug is meant to be inherited.
Axminster Carpet
Axminster is loom woven, not handmade. The technique takes its name from the Devon town where the original hand-weaving workshops were established in the eighteenth century. What carries the name now is a mechanised weave that inserts each tuft individually from a set of yarn colours.
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That mechanism is what gives it range. Axminster holds fine pattern repeats and large colour counts at a consistency handwork cannot match across broadloom runs, which is why it is the standard for hotels, clubs and any floor that has to read as one surface.
It comes in wide widths for installation rather than as a finished rug, and it is made to order against a design and a quantity.
Our Axminster is woven in an 80/20 wool nylon blend. The wool carries the surface and the recovery. The nylon carries the wear.
Shagpile
A shag pile rug features long, soft fibres that create a plush and luxurious feel underfoot. Made from 100% New Zealand wool, it can be custom coloured any way you like. Its deep texture adds warmth and comfort, making it ideal for bedrooms, living rooms and relaxed spaces.
Handloomed
Handlooming is a traditional rug-making technique in which skilled artisans work together to operate a large manual loom. Using rods and shuttles, they carefully interlace yarn to create the rug’s structure and texture. This method is ideal for plain designs, subtle patterns and rich, tactile finishes.
Finishes
Cut Pile
The loops of yarn are sheared level, leaving the fibre ends standing upright.
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Cut ends catch light differently depending on which way the pile is leaning, so the surface shades. A single-colour rug reads lighter in one direction and darker in the other, and that shift is part of what gives cut pile its depth.
It is the softer of the two underfoot and the more open, which also means it shows traffic. Footprints and vacuum lines are visible in cut pile and will always be visible. In a room that is meant to look composed at all times, that is a consideration.
Available across all our constructions. It is the default unless a design calls for something else.
Loop Pile
The loops are left uncut, so the surface is formed of rounded arcs rather than fibre ends.
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The closed surface holds its appearance. Loop pile does not shade, does not show footprints, and does not track. It reads as one flat, even plane, which is why it suits large areas and open-plan floors where a shifting surface would be distracting.
It is firmer than cut pile and more textural to walk on. It resists crushing well, and it is the more resilient finish in traffic.
Available on hand tufted and Axminster. Not available on hand knotting, where the pile is formed by cut knots.
Carving
The pile is cut back by hand along the lines of the design, bevelling the edge of each shape so it stands separately from what surrounds it.
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Carving does what no yarn choice can. It puts a shadow between two areas of the same colour, which sharpens definition and gives a flat design physical depth. On geometric work it makes the edges read as deliberate rather than approximate.
It is applied after the rug is made, by hand, to a full-size design. It adds to both cost and lead time, and it needs sufficient pile depth to cut into. It works hardest on semi-worsted wool, where the density holds a crisp edge.
Available on hand tufted. We specify it where a design depends on definition rather than colour.
Felted Yarn
Wool spun into a thick, loosely bound yarn rather than a fine one.
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The result is heavily textural. Felted wool sits high and irregular, catching light in broad soft masses rather than fine detail, and it is deep and yielding underfoot.
It carries no detail. Fine linework and tight pattern disappear into it. We specify it where texture is the design.
Custom
Talk it through with a consultant.
Material, construction and finish decided in one conversation.
