A Brief History of the Rug: From Pazyryk to UK Living Rooms

The modern rug is performing the same role its earliest surviving ancestors did, and its return to British living rooms is a direct consequence of hard flooring replacing fitted carpet, according to a new editorial analysis from Furniture in Fashion. The report traces the rug from the Pazyryk carpet, held by the State Hermitage Museum, through the trade routes that carried knotting techniques across Persia, Anatolia and Central Asia, to its arrival in Britain first as a luxury import and later as a mechanised domestic product. It argues that wall to wall carpet suppressed the rug for much of the twentieth century and that engineered wood, laminate and tile flooring brought it back by reintroducing the acoustic and visual problems carpet had quietly solved. The analysis identifies undersized rugs as the most common furnishing error in UK living rooms and sets out placement rules by room and furniture layout....