Rug love for Valentine’s Day

COVER selects four rugs from its 20-year-old archive that best commemorate the day of love

This rug, which featured in COVER 42 from Spring 2016, is from Iwan Maktabi’s collaborative rug project ‘One Carpet for Love’ which celebrates the creativity of Beirut designers in wool. Bokja’s heart-shaped rug Hob (Arabic for ‘love’) is a patchwork of patterns taken from textiles collected from across the world, particularly focused on the Levant and Central Asia. The duo add: ‘Each piece of textile used upholds its individual physical identity as it becomes juxtaposed with others; old with new, found with made, western with eastern, natural with artificial.’

Featured in COVER 57 from Winter 2019, the rug Brooklyn may hold the key (literally) to the importance of designer Roger Selden’s native New York. Born in Brooklyn in 1945, the field of Selden’s Brooklyn rug resembles a pietra dura mosaic (Italy is Selden’s adopted home of many years). The field of hearts includes a key shaft with a heart head. Does it represent Brooklyn as the key to Selden’s heart?

It is hard not to have an emotional response to the intense colours and brilliance of this Nabila design from Jan Kath’s Tuareg collection, which featured in COVER 76 from Autumn 2024, and is made by Kath’s local partners in small manufactories in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. All the dyes are natural and this dark red is obtained from the shells of pomegranates.

This rug featured in COVER 54 from Winter 2019 and its simple design ironically also follows the classic design world editing principle known as KISS—’keep it simple’. The design includes lips in profile that create a whimsical heart, while full frontal lips seem to reference strong female characters in classic Hollywood movies whose calling cards were red lipstick stains on white linen napkins. Sheared wool pile amplifies each mouth while silk fibre creates highlighted lip shine.