Berber Loom | 360 x 280 cm | Nr. Z-3060

Berber Loom

Delivery time	2 days
Origin	India
Dimensions	360 cm x 280 cm (= 10.08 m²)
Construction	hand-looped
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes)
knots	120.000
Edition	one-of-a-kind piece

Origin

Berber rugs were traditionally knotted for use in the home. The weavers, predominantly 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 colourful, abstract shapes and lines on monochrome backgrounds. Our Beni Berber rugs are inspired by these traditional patterns.

Architects and designers such as Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer and Arne Jacobsen loved the naive, clear design of these high-pile Moroccan nomad rugs. Their powerful artistic expression gives them an extraordinary presence and makes Berber rugs quite incomparable – even setting aside how soft they feel underfoot.

In its design and its traditional making, this rug is inspired by the classic Berber rugs, but it was produced in India. Instead of knotting the wool, the wool was hand-looped. This creates an equally fascinating, cosy look and structure.

Material

The technique used to make the materials for the pile of this Berber Loom is more than 200 years old. The wool was dyed with natural dyes and spun by hand. Dyeing with natural or plant dyes is more complicated, more expensive and more time-consuming than dyeing with chemical colours. For a luminous red, for example, you need around one kilo of ground madder root as dyestuff for every kilo of wool. For a strong yellow that is not too pale, it even takes two kilograms of weld dye per kilo of wool. Spinning the wool is just as time-consuming and labour-intensive. On top of that, fewer and fewer people still know how to spin wool by hand.

But the effort is worth it: dyeing with natural colours allows the high-quality wool to keep its natural oil content. Wool that has been dyed with natural colours and spun by hand creates fascinating, shimmering patterns. The charm of hand-spun wool, with its slight irregularities and natural shades, comes into its own as a contrast in modern interiors, but equally in rooms furnished in a more traditional or country style.