The RugsOnNet Blog

A rag rug is woven on a loom from strips of cut cloth, which is what separates it from a braided or a hooked rug. Our 25 antique American rag rugs run $400 to $12,000 and work out at $89 a square foot against $167 for the rest of the collection, a discount that survives matching on both size and date. They also come big: half are room size and a quarter are long runners.

Baotou, Mongolian and Kansu rugs come out of one northern Chinese weaving belt, and our 72 in stock show that the three names are really three dates. Measured per square foot against antiques of the same area and period, a Mongolian runs about 1.36 times and a Baotou about 1.02 times. The fret border, the wan motif and the birds are the markers to look for.

An antique Donegal is a hand knotted Irish Arts and Crafts carpet, almost all of it woven between 1898 and 1930. Our 26 run a median 34,500 dollars, which looks like 3.53 times the catalogue but is 1.40 times once matched on measured area. Coral rather than green, floral rather than geometric, and the only type we hold with named Western designers.

An antique dhurrie is the cheapest antique floor we sell by the square foot, and almost nobody notices, because the price tags look ordinary. The median antique dhurrie in our stock is 12,000 dollars against

A Savonnerie is the formal European court carpet with a knotted pile, and almost everything written about it online is history. This page is the other half. Every number here is measured from the 25

Turkmen rugs are the most disciplined looking weavings in the antique market and the most confusing to shop for. The discipline is real: one repeating motif, one dominant colour, ordered rows, very little variation from

An antique Khotan solves a room problem that almost nothing else in the antique market solves. It is a hand knotted wool pile rug from the oasis city of Khotan in the Tarim Basin, on

An antique Afshar is the rug that people fall for in a shop and then assume they cannot afford, right up to the point they look at the ticket. It is a hand knotted wool

An antique Bessarabian is the European flat woven carpet that most buyers meet without a name for it: large roses or garlands drawn boldly on a dark ground, no pile at all, and a scale

An antique Bakhtiari is the rug you buy when the room is too big for most antiques and you do not want a medallion in the middle of it. It comes from the Chahar Mahal