How a custom rug is made at Interiors, from sketch to install

Every custom rug that leaves Interiors starts the same way: a designer sends us something. Sometimes it is a drawing on a scrap of paper with the room's measurements in the margin. Sometimes it is a fabric, a paint chip and a photograph of a rug they saw in a hotel lobby ten years ago. Once it was a pom, a single tuft of wool, mailed in an envelope with the words "this color, 11 feet round." Here is what happens next, with the photographs from one of our own.

1. The sketch

This one came in as a pencil drawing: an 11 foot 3 inch round, a scrolled border, the widest part of the design about 5 feet across, and a note about the space between the border and the edge. That is enough. We confirm the size against the room (in this case the chairs had to sit on the rug with their back legs clear of the border), and the drawing goes to our designer to be redrawn for the loom.

2. The rendering

Within about two weeks the designer receives a rendering: the design at the right proportions, in the colors proposed, with the fiber and construction and a net quote. The strip of colors along the bottom is the palette, each one a wool pom with a number. Revisions are the point of this step, not an exception. Three rounds is normal; the goal is that nothing is a surprise when the sample arrives.

3. The poms

Poms are the mill's dyed wool samples, each a short brush of yarn on a numbered post. We lay them out on the studio table against the designer's fabric or paint and choose the palette by eye, in daylight, because wool reads warmer and deeper than a screen ever shows it. When the designer wants a color the mill does not have, the mill dyes to match from a pom or a fabric; it adds a week or two and it is worth it.

4. The strike-off

A strike-off is a woven sample of the actual design, usually 18 by 18 inches or a corner that shows the border, made on the same loom by the same hands that will make the rug. It arrives 4 to 6 weeks after the rendering is approved. This is what goes in front of the client. If a color is off or the scale of a motif is wrong, we change it and weave again; it is a great deal cheaper to be wrong at 18 inches than at 11 feet.

5. On the loom

Production for a hand-made rug takes 18 to 20 weeks after the strike-off is approved and the deposit is in. This is where patience pays: a hand-knotted rug at 100 knots to the square inch is tied one knot at a time, and a 9 by 12 holds about 1.5 million of them. We send photographs from the loom at the midpoint, which clients love and designers find reassuring.

6. Finished

Off the loom the rug is washed, sheared, stretched and finished at the edges, then inspected against the strike-off. Then it is rolled, crated and shipped: to the site, or to our installer in the client's city if the floor needs preparation or the rug needs a pad cut to shape.

7. Installed

This is the round from the sketch, on the floor in an oceanfront living room with the chairs where the drawing said they would be. From the pencil sketch to this photograph took just under six months. The designer saw it four times in between: the rendering, the poms, the strike-off and the loom photos, and had no surprises on install day, which is the only review that matters.

Designs created with Interiors are made through Interiors; we keep the production files, and we keep the relationship with the mill that has made hundreds of these. If you have a drawing, a fabric or a pom, the Design Studio is where it starts, and the custom rugs guide covers cost drivers and timelines in more detail.