Introducing Imprint: A Rug Collaboration with Concept Hand Tufting

Anyone who has laid a good rug in a room knows the feeling. The sofa suddenly looks like it belongs where it is. The floor stops being just a floor. The whole room settles in a way that is hard to describe until you have seen it happen. That settling is the part we care about most, and it is what Imprint, our first rug collection, is built around. Imprint is a collection of bespoke hand-tufted rugs made for homes that are actually lived in. The patterns are painterly and a little unruly, and the colours come from the natural world: soft, distressed sage greens, warm creams, quiet stone tones, with the odd fleck of shadow running through. We wanted rugs that feel gathered over time rather than picked off a shelf, as at ease beside an old writing desk as they are under something sculptural and modern. They are designed to be built into a scheme and to grow more at home in it over the years.

A collaboration that had been coming for a while

Imprint did not appear out of nowhere. For the past few years we have designed bespoke rugs for client projects in partnership with Concept Hand Tufting, and at some point it stopped making sense not to turn that work into a collection of our own. This felt less like a leap and more like the obvious next step.

The designs are Lu Fitoussi-Findlay's, treowe's founder, drawn and refined with Concept Hand Tufting's wonderful team at every stage. It is a genuine meeting of two crafts. Lu thinks about pattern and colour, and about how a rug has to earn its place in a room over years as the furniture around it moves and the space gets used in new ways. Concept Hand Tufting know, down to the last tuft, exactly what the craft can and cannot do. What comes out of that conversation is a collection that is as carefully made as it is good to look at.

What hand tufting actually means

Every rug in the collection is hand tufted, which is a slower and far more human way to make one. Working from a full-size drawing, the makers push yarn through a fabric backing by hand, building the pattern up tuft by tuft and colour by colour. It takes patience and a good eye, and it allows a freedom that machine-made rugs cannot match. Curves stay soft. Colours blend the way a painter would blend them. Texture can be carved and layered so the rug has real depth underfoot. These are rugs you will want to walk on barefoot.

Because each one is made by hand, each one can be made for you: your size, your colours, your scheme. Bespoke is not a bolt-on at treowe, it is how we think homes should work.

The makers: a boutique studio with real experience

We work with a trusted circle of makers, and for Imprint that maker is Concept Hand Tufting, a small business with decades of hand tufting behind it and a real love of good design. They make and supply bespoke carpets and rugs for clients around the world, bringing together fresh eyes and long memory across generations of textile knowledge. It means every rug gets a designer's judgement and a maker's hands, which is exactly what a piece like this needs.

Heritage in every thread

Concept Hand Tufting's story goes back further than most. It began as Fred Lawton and Son Ltd, founded in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 1902, and grew into one of the most established textile names in the country. That family history still shows in how they work, in the standards they hold, and in the care they give each commission.

They are also the only carpet and rug specialist in the UK with a yarn-spinning background, so their feel for this small, particular corner of interior design runs deeper than most. They do not just pull a fibre off a shelf. They know it from the raw material up: how it takes colour, how it wears, how it feels, and how it holds up after years of real life in a real home.

Choosing your yarn: wool, cotton and silk

One of the quiet pleasures of a bespoke rug is that a single design can feel like three different rugs depending on the yarn, which also means one design can sit at a few different price points. On Concept's advice we have worked with worsted wool, polished cotton and fine silk across the collection, often mixing them in a single piece to build depth and texture.

Worsted wool is the backbone of most of the rugs. Spun from long, combed fibres, it is smooth, strong and hard-wearing, and it holds its shape and colour for years. It keeps pattern edges crisp, feels lovely underfoot and is naturally warm, which makes it the sensible choice for a rug that has to cope with a busy room.

Polished cotton is the softer voice in the mix. It has a gentle sheen and a lighter, more relaxed hand than wool, catching the light rather than sitting flat and matt. Worked into a design, it adds tonal depth and a soft-focus quality that keeps a rug from ever looking one-note.

Fine silk is used sparingly, for subtle moments of luxury within designs. It is luminous and fluid and reflects light like nothing else, so the same colour seems to shift as you move around the room. Because it is finer and more delicate, we tend to keep it for the these highlights: a motif or a run of pattern picked out to catch the eye and give a design a little more richness.

Most of the interest is in the mix. Set the durability of worsted wool against the quiet light of polished cotton or the shimmer of silk, and you get contrast and dimension in a single rug. That interplay of fibres, backed by Concept's yarn-spinning heritage, is what gives Imprint its depth.

See the collection

Fall for a design exactly as it is, or reimagine it in your own colours and proportions. Either way, we will help you make something that belongs completely to your home.

Explore the Imprint collection.