Reading the grid

A checkered Moroccan rug organizes its field in squares or blocks of color knotted in wool. A mosaic Moroccan rug repeats smaller units, often with floral forms, so the surface reads like tilework. Both draw on Berber heritage as a broad tradition rather than one tribe. Zarbish knots the first in the Dama collection and the second in Mozaic, in our workshop in the Middle Atlas.

Berber names a broad heritage here, not a tribe. Checkered and mosaic patterns run through Moroccan weaving widely enough that no single group owns them, so we do not attach Dama or Mozaic to one. Where a design does sit in a named lineage we say so plainly: Boujaad for Bloom, Beni Ourain for Dune and Jibal. For the grid collections, Berber is the honest word, and the rest of the description does the specific work.

Grids in wool

A grid in a hand-knotted rug is counted, never printed. The weaver works across one row at a time against a counted plan and changes wool color at the knot where the plan says the block changes. Here is the part you only learn at the loom: the block edges still wander by a knot or two, because one hand's tension is not the next hand's. That drift is the whole difference. A machine-made checkerboard repeats the same edge down the whole field. Ours does not, and that is why a wool grid stays soft in a room instead of reading like flooring.

Blocks and arches

Dama is the grid at full size. Color blocks, checkerboards and rows of arches give the designs their graphic character, with raised motifs on many pieces bringing the pattern into relief. The scale is the point: a block large enough to read from the doorway gives a room its order the way a tiled floor does, which is why the collection's line is Soft architecture.

Zellige takes its name from Morocco's cut-tile mosaic. Deep teal holds the morning light and goes near black by lamplight, so the ivory and dusty-pink checker reads bright at breakfast and warm at dinner. That shift is the argument for a grid in a room people use at both ends of the day, and it runs through the checkered Berber rugs in the Dama collection generally.

Blue checkered rugs

A blue checkered rug sets navy or dusty blue against a warmer square, and blue is the color that keeps a grid calm: it sits back while peach, coral and rust come forward. In Dama, blue runs through several grids, at two very different scales.

Tirra is the close-up version. Navy and salmon-peach squares sit on pale blush in a checker drawn by hand, tight at the center and loosening into long navy bars at the top, the bottom and both sides, so the grid seems to open out as it reaches the floor around it. It reads best from a few steps away, from the sofa rather than from the door.

Alwan works at the doorway scale: a large checkerboard of navy, coral pink, rust red and cream squares in three rows, with a row of rounded cream cells set in rust at each short end. Each square is big enough to read from across the room, which suits a living room with plain upholstery and a long view to the floor.

Tiles and flowers

Mozaic works at the other scale. Smaller repeated blocks and floral forms cover the field, many designs setting an ivory ground against navy, teal, pink, coral or burgundy. Where Dama gives a room a structure to sit inside, Mozaic gives it a surface with depth, closer to tilework than to architecture. Hence Wool that speaks in tiles.

Biban is named for the Arabic word for gates, and its rows of black vertical capsules with a blush halo repeat across ivory like a row of arched doorways. Blush softens under midday light; the black marks sharpen again once evening lamps come on. Small units behave this way in general, which is what makes the mosaic-patterned Berber rugs in Mozaic easier to live with under existing pattern than a large checkerboard would be.

Side by side

Both are hand-knotted in 100% wool, both are made to order in every shape, round and runner included, and both offer the same choice of short, medium or shag pile with tassels optional. If neither grid is what you are after, the third way to organize a floor is a drawing rather than a grid, which is what the Jibal drawing does with lines and lozenges.

The round grid

A circle and a grid are not natural partners, and cropping a rectangle is where most of them fail: the outer squares get sliced and the edge reads like an accident. We recompose the design for the circle instead, so the pattern meets itself on every side and the outer ring closes. The same is true of a runner: the grid is redrawn for the narrow field rather than sliced from the original, which is why our round and runner versions differ slightly from the standard drawing. The shape gets its own design. A round grid under a round table is the cleanest version of this, because the rug repeats the table's own geometry rather than arguing with it.

Tigmi is named for the Amazigh word for house, and its arch-topped window grid stays straight while the terracotta ground carries it to the circle's edge. Peach and terracotta warm at lunchtime, then settle into navy shadow once the light drops for dinner. Every design in both collections exists as a circle, listed together on the round rugs page.

Rooms for grids

Three checks before a grid goes into a room:

1. Count the patterned surfaces. If the sofa, the curtains and the cushions already carry pattern, choose the small repeat or change what is on the sofa. The rug should be the loudest patterned thing in the room, and the only one arguing.
2. Read the scale from the doorway, not from above. A large block that looks strong in a photograph often looks correct from the door and busy from a chair; a small repeat does the opposite.
3. Decide what the grid is aligned to. A checkerboard reads best when its blocks run parallel to the longest wall or to the table above it. A grid set at an angle to the room reads as a mistake even when it is not.

Color is the other half of this, and the method for it is in decorating around a colorful rug: pull three tones from the rug, place each twice, keep the walls and the sofa plain.

Count the patterned surfaces first, then choose the scale of the grid.

• Zellige, Dama collection. /product/zellige-teal-ochre-moroccan-rug
• Biban, Mozaic collection. /product/biban-ivory-black-moroccan-rug
• Chebka, Mozaic collection, round. /product/chebka-navy-peach-round-moroccan-rug