Malayer | 320 x 94 cm | Nr. 20583

Malayer

Delivery time	2 days
Origin	Persia
Dimensions	320 cm x 94 cm (= 3.01 m²)
Construction	hand-knotted
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes)
knots	90.000
Condition	pre-owned, cleaned & partially restored
Edition	one-of-a-kind piece

Origin

Malayer is the second-largest city in the province of Hamadan in western Iran and is known for its rug-knotting workshops. Malayer lies between Hamadan and Khorramabad, 380 km south-west of Tehran. The city of Malayer as it stands today was founded in 1808 under the name Daulatabad, in order to bring the restless region along the Zagros mountains under the control of the Persian state.

Material

The technique used to make the materials for the pile of this Malayer is over 200 years old. The wool was dyed with natural colours and spun by hand. Dyeing with natural or plant dyes is more involved, more expensive and more time-consuming than dyeing with chemical colours. For a luminous red, for example, you need roughly one kilo of ground madder root as dye per kilo of wool. For a strong yellow that is not too pale you even need two kilograms of weld per kilo of wool. Spinning the wool is labour-intensive and takes time as well. 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.

The weft and warp threads of this Malayer are made of cotton. This versatile material is tear-resistant and supple, which makes it particularly well suited to a hard-wearing foundation weave.

Condition

This Malayer has had admirers before you. It was knotted around 106. It has been cleaned thoroughly and is in good, though only partly restored, condition. In places the pile has grown thinner. The fringes and edges could also do with a repair here and there. We have not fully restored this Malayer, because we feel it has a special charm just as it is. If that is what you would like, we are of course happy to carry on restoring it for you. We can bring almost any rug back to near-perfect condition.