Gulabi Chobi One-OF-A-Kind-Afghan Rug

The Hazara weavers of Kabul have always understood that the botanical carpet need not be purely botanical. This piece works across a warm dusty rose field — the colour of old plaster walls in a house that has been lived in happily — with a vine scroll that opens into flowers and then keeps going: small animals move through the pattern, birds perch between blooms, creatures half-botanical and half-imagined occupy the corners.

It is a very old idea, the populated garden carpet, and one that never quite goes out of meaning. A teal border frames it with gentle precision. Wool on cotton, hand-knotted at 110 knots per square inch in Kabul, where this style has been refined across generations.