Beni Berber | 315 x 247 cm | Nr. 20328

Modern Beni Berber, beige with diamonds and stripes

Origin	Pakistan
Dimensions	315 cm x 247 cm (= 7.78 m²)
Construction	hand-knotted
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes) Weft & Warp: wool
knots per m²2	90.000
Pile height	9mm
Condition	new
Colour	Beige, black
Edition	one-of-a-kind piece

 

Origin

Berber rugs were traditionally knotted for use in the home. The weavers, mostly women, played freely and spontaneously with shapes and colours – without any pattern templates – following their own ideas and their individual intuition. That is why the traditional pattern of Moroccan Berber rugs typically consists of geometric, sometimes vividly colourful, abstract shapes and lines on monochrome backgrounds. Designers such as Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer and Arne Jacobsen admired the naive, clear design of these high-pile Moroccan nomad rugs. Their powerful artistic expression has an extraordinary presence and makes Berber rugs quite incomparable – quite apart from their soft, fluffy feel. The surface of this rug has a mottled look. The changes in tone and the light and dark shading of the pile yarn run across the length of the rug, making the colours shimmer and keeping the rug from showing dirt. These so-called colour shifts (abrash) give the rug a livelier look. The mottling comes about because the wool is hand-spun. During dyeing, the natural dyes are taken up unevenly.

 

Pattern

The clear, abstract design of this contemporary rug speaks especially to people who love simple, modern interiors and architecture. The design idea for this rug comes from Europe. Free from the rules of traditional rug patterns, it was developed for Western art and interior styles. That is not an entirely new development, though. The roots of European rug design go back to Art Deco rugs, which were made to Western specifications between the late twenties and the fifties.

In the pattern of this Beni Berber it is above all the diamonds that stand out. A diamond is a rhombus standing on one of its points, and in an Oriental rug its four equal sides can be jagged, stepped or set with hooks. The diamond is one of the oldest basic shapes in the Oriental rug. In the Islamic world it carries a symbolic meaning: it stands for the immortality of the soul. That is why it is found so often as a filler motif.

The straight stripes of this Beni Berber order and structure the pattern.

The background of this Beni Berber is beige.

 

Material

This hand-knotted Berber rug has a dense, fairly high pile. That makes it wonderfully cosy and hard-wearing. Traditionally, Berber rugs — like Lori or Gabbeh rugs — were used for sleeping on. They invite you to sit and lounge about in the living room, yet they also work beautifully in walkways and dining areas. The warp and weft yarns of this Berber rug are made of cotton; the pile is made of wool that is dyed with natural colours and hand-spun. The hand-spun wool is what gives the Loris their soft surface. The foundation (weft and warp threads) of this Beni Berber is made of new wool.