May 14, 2026
I’ve said it before, but my favorite part of this job is finally seeing the photos once a project is installed. The Atworth is a perfect example of why. When I’m designing on a desktop monitor, I know a rug is going to be a 22-foot round, but it’s still just a drawing on a screen. Seeing the final photos with all the furniture on it is always impressive, especially knowing the sheer scale of what goes into hand-making something that big.
For this project, the design firm came to us needing four custom rugs. Usually, clients have a direction in mind or pick from our design bank. We go back and forth with digital mockups, making revisions until the artwork is exactly what they want.
Once the art is approved, we assign colors using physical yarn poms. We do this because computer monitors all show colors differently. By using the same set of poms as the yarn dyer, we make sure the final wool matches what the designer picked.
Designing for this kind of scale is a bit of a balancing act. You have to make sure the smallest details can actually be woven, but you also have to realize that a "small" area on my screen might end up being over a foot wide in real life. For the Atworth rugs, we used solid areas of color with a very subtle variation achieved through hand-dyeing. It gives the rugs visual interest without making them look too busy at 20+ feet.
All of these rugs were hand-dyed and hand-tufted by expert weavers. There is so much planning that goes into a project like this. Even just moving a rug this size around is a challenge. I can assure you, at 20-something feet long, these things are incredibly heavy. It’s a lot of work, but seeing them finally sitting in the space makes it worth it.
If you are working on a project that requires a specific solution, such as a unique shape or a large-scale design that standard rugs cannot accommodate, we invite you to visit our custom rugs page to explore our options and begin a project of your own.
