How our rugs are made, at a glance

On the loom, the warp threads are stretched lengthways. The weaver passes the weft thread across and presses each row down with a comb until the weave is dense enough. This often gives flat rugs without a high pile.

You can spot it by the small quirks. The edges aren't dead straight, and a pattern can sit a few millimetres out in places. So two rugs of the same design are never completely identical. That comes with the territory.

Handwoven rugs are firm and hard-wearing, because the weave holds itself together. How you care for them depends on the material. Wool needs different care from jute, and the details are in the care tips.

Wool is the most common material for this method (114 rugs), followed by cotton with 98 and jute with 87. A few are viscose or synthetic fibre. Examples are Juteteppich Alia, Juteteppich Cate and the In- & Outdoor Teppich aus recyceltem Material.

When a rug is knotted, each knot is looped by hand around the warp threads and cut off. The ends of the threads later form the pile. It takes time. A large rug can spend many weeks on the knotting loom.

You can see how finely it was knotted on the back. If the knots are small and tightly packed, the pattern can be drawn in more detail on the front.

Hand-knotted rugs are dense and heavy. The pile is anchored in the base weave and is almost impossible to pull out, so they take a lot of wear. We have 32, all of them wool, and they're cared for like other wool rugs.

Examples are Bidjar Herati Teppich, Bakhtiar Teppich and Nain Teppich.

Tufting is done with a hand-held gun. It shoots the yarn as loops through a stretched backing cloth, with the pattern already drawn on. That's much quicker than knotting.

To hold the loops in place, the back is glued with latex and usually covered with fabric. So the pile sits in glue, not in knots. One look at the back gives it away: instead of knots, you see a layer of fabric.

Hand-tufted rugs feel dense and soft. Clear shapes and large blocks of colour work well. There are downsides too. When new, the glue can smell a little, and over the years the back can turn brittle. Avoid wet cleaning, as the glue may come loose.

Of the 43 rugs, 25 are made of synthetic fibre and 18 of wool. They include Hochflorteppich Silky, Wollteppich Sina and Teppich Holly.

Handloom means a hand-operated loom. The frame has a mechanism that lifts and lowers the warp threads. People move it, using their hands and feet.

This makes the weave more even than pure hand weaving. The surface is smooth and flat, and calm patterns with clear lines are typical. Small irregularities remain, because a person sets the rhythm and not a machine.

Only seven of our rugs are made this way, all of them wool. You care for them according to their material, not the weave. They are the Wollteppich Gabbeh Don, Wollteppich Gabbeh Soni and Wollteppich Gabbeh Vida ranges.

It starts with a file on a computer. A computer-controlled loom turns that design into a rug, row by row and identical every time. Just over a quarter of our rugs are made like this.

That has two advantages. The rug looks exactly like the photo, and a second one for the next room matches the first. On large sizes you notice it most, because a pattern stays exactly the same over three or four metres. Fine lines and colour gradients come out very precisely by machine.

Synthetic fibre is used almost every time (167 of the 171 rugs), for example polypropylene or polyester. The other four are viscose. A machine-woven rug usually costs less than a handmade one of the same size.

What's missing is the human touch. No small variations, no one-off pieces. If you like things even and uniform, this is the right place. Bahar Teppich, Hochflorteppich Breeze and Flachgewebeteppich Noah show how different the look can be all the same.

In our data, Kelim is not a method of its own. The word stands for a flat-woven construction, in other words a weave without pile.

All 98 rugs with Kelim in the title are handwoven, so they also appear under that method. Examples are Baumwollteppich Kelim Durry, Flachgewebeteppich Kelim Azizi and Flachgewebeteppich Kelim Mia.

With the word Flachgewebe it pays to look closely, as some machine-woven rugs have it in their name too. How a rug was made is listed under its method.

The edges, back and surface usually show what you're dealing with. Here are the methods side by side.