From Loom to Living Room, a Website for a Luxury Rug Showroom
Couture Knots is a by-appointment, hand-knotted rug showroom that represents 21 handmade lines from makers in Europe, Asia and South America. Rugs that can take four to five months to make and are meant to stay with a home for decades.
This website had to speak to designers fluent in pile heights and fiber content, and also to homeowners encountering terms like that for the first time. The redesign gave much more emphasis to Ali Nikrooz’s story and credentials, the weavers and designers, and the depth of the showroom’s numerous collections. The redesign also introduced the Concierge Program, which brings Ali’s consultation to whole-home projects anywhere in the country.
Photography
The site is led by photography. The rugs are shown at large format in finished rooms, never as flat swatches on a white backdrop. The homepage opens on a full-width interior and then brings in another stunningly styled room in each section, showing the rugs in context so potential clients can picture a piece in their own homes. A blue abstract rug sits under a cream sofa in a paneled living room with a chandelier and garden views. A patterned rug picks up the colors of an oversized painting in a dining room set for a dinner party. A black and cream rug lies at the foot of a low bed, facing a wall of glass and a mountain lake. In each image, the rug is part of the room and the life lived there, not presented as an object for sale.
White space is used deliberately throughout. Images are given generous margins, and text blocks are short and set well apart, so each photograph is seen on its own, much as Ali presents rugs one at a time in the showroom. The pacing is closer to a design magazine than a retail catalog. The palette is neutral so the rugs can supply the color, from the dense, saturated patterns of Wendy Morrison to the quiet tonal surfaces of Tania Johnson’s photographs translated into wool and silk.
Story
The site also showcases moments from the making: A weaver at a loom, surrounded by bundles of hanging yarn. Carpets in front of an earthen wall, with desert mountains behind. A child holding a white alpaca in the Peruvian highlands. A pair of hands sorting skeins of colored yarn.
These images bring the long chain of people behind each piece into view: the weavers whose months of work end up under a coffee table in Charlotte or Manhattan. Placing the loom and the living room on the same page helps a buyer understand what they’re actually paying for.
Organization
Each of the 21 collections now has its own page, opening with a short profile of the maker before the rugs themselves. A visitor learns that Paulig is a German weaving house operating since 1750, that Turquoise Mountain was founded by King Charles III to sustain weaving communities in Afghanistan, and that Tania Johnson begins every design with her own photographs of the natural world.
A gallery of current styles follows each profile, built so Ali can add new designs and photography as they arrive without design support. The collections stay current, and the site grows with the showroom.
