The Craft
Hand-Tufted vs. Hand-Knotted: What's the Difference?
The two terms get used interchangeably, but they describe genuinely different techniques — and it's worth knowing which one you're buying.
Hand-knotted rugs are woven on a loom, with each individual knot tied by hand around the warp threads. It's an extremely slow, skill-intensive technique that can take months for a single rug, and it produces a rug with no separate backing — the knots themselves form the structure. Hand-knotted rugs are typically thinner, more durable over generations, and command the highest prices in the rug world.
Hand-tufted rugs are made by punching yarn through a backing fabric using a hand-tufting gun, following a pre-drawn design. It's faster than hand-knotting, still entirely done by hand and still requires real skill — building even pile height, following intricate colour lines, carving texture — but it makes more complex, colourful designs achievable at a more accessible price point. A canvas backing is applied afterward for structure.
Every House of Souravi rug is hand-tufted. It's the technique that lets us work in the kind of detailed, multi-colour, texturally varied designs you'll see across the collection — things that would be extremely difficult, or take drastically longer, to hand-knot.
The Home
How to Choose the Right Rug Size for Your Sofa
The single most common rug mistake is buying one too small for the room. A rug that's undersized makes furniture look like it's floating, disconnected from everything around it.
As a starting rule: the front legs of your sofa and any chairs in the seating group should rest on the rug. This visually ties the furniture together as one arrangement, rather than scattering pieces around a small rug island in the middle of the floor.
For a standard sofa (around 7–8 feet), an 8' x 10' rug is usually the safest choice for a living room of average size — it's large enough to anchor a full seating group. In a smaller room, a 6' x 9' can still work, provided you're comfortable with only the front legs of your furniture on the rug rather than all four.
Leave roughly 12–18 inches of bare floor between the rug's edge and the wall on each side — enough to frame the rug without the room feeling like it's wall-to-wall carpet. If you're unsure, our Size Guide covers the other rooms too, and we're always happy to help you work it out for your exact space.
The Craft
Why Wool Is One of the Best Materials for a Handmade Rug
There's a reason wool has been the material of choice for rug-making for centuries, and it's not just tradition — it genuinely performs better underfoot than most alternatives.
Wool fibres are naturally crimped, which gives a rug resilience: step on it, and the pile springs back rather than staying flattened. That same structure makes wool naturally resistant to matting and crushing over years of foot traffic, in a way synthetic fibres often can't match.
Wool also holds dye exceptionally well, which is part of why hand-tufted wool rugs can carry such rich, saturated colour — look at the depth of tone in a piece like Canyon Agate or Midnight Bloom. And practically, wool is naturally soil- and stain-resistant to a degree, since the fibre's outer layer repels liquid long enough to blot up a spill before it sets in.
We use 100% New Zealand wool across the entire House of Souravi collection — selected specifically for its softness and durability. It's a deliberate choice, not a default one.
