Moroccan rug
Moroccan rug
The Leopard
This rug was hand-woven in the Atlas Mountains, by an Amazigh weaver working on a vertical wooden loom in the Berber knot. The material is sheep wool in its natural tans, unbroken by dye. Wide bands of dark brown run the length of the field like something drawn in charcoal, thinning and thickening as they travel - and along the bottom edge the pattern breaks entirely, into a loose patchwork of rust, mustard and cream blocks, as if the weaver changed her mind about where the rug should end. The two halves don't try to agree with each other, and the rug is better for it.
One of a kind. Woven by a single weaver, on a single loom. The piece in the photographs is the piece that will arrive.
- Dimensions: 200 × 310 cm
- Material: sheep wool
- Origin: Atlas Mountains, Morocco
Exclusive to Australia.
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About our rugs
In the villages of the Moroccan Atlas, rugs have been woven by hand for as long as anyone has counted - by Amazigh women, on upright wooden looms, one knot at a time. The craft is matrilineal. Until quite recently none of it was made for export: a rug was a blanket on a cold mountain night, a piece for a daughter's wedding, a record of a life. The symbols in the wool are not decoration. They are language and biography, the maker writing her own story into the piece she is making.
Not every rug we bring back is a mountain piece. Morocco's cities had their own workshop tradition - carpets knotted to order, with the medallions and dense colour of a formal room. These vintage pieces have travelled further and lived longer; decades have softened the wool and settled the dye into something no new rug can fake. And a newer generation of weavers, in the same villages, with the same knot, has begun drawing more freely - looser, closer to a line drawing than a grid. The tradition has not stopped. It has kept moving.
We bring five kinds of rug to Australia, sourced directly from the village or the workshop.
Beni Ourain. High Atlas. Cream sheep wool, dark geometric markings - the rug most people picture when they picture a Moroccan rug.
Azilal. High Atlas. More colourful and freer in its drawing, often wool mixed with cotton.
Boucherouite. Pieced from recycled clothing and household scraps - a rug made to be lived on.
Vintage and antique. City-woven, with the medallions and formal borders of a workshop tradition. History the piece carries before it reaches you.
Contemporary abstract. Same looms, same knot - weavers drawing freely rather than repeating an inherited pattern.
Every rug is one of a kind, woven by a single weaver, on a single loom.
