Simple and timeless 

I started this company to make rugs for people to love.

For some it is enough for a rug to just lie on the floor and look great. My aim was to transcend superficial attractiveness and to touch people more deeply than with only color and design. I believe that in a world of mass-produced and mechanically flawless products, what people really want to live with are a few great things that speak to them through their exquisite materials, and the subtle variations created by the human hand. Tufenkian Carpets stand alongside the best of those, but promise much more.

We promise a deeper connection that comes from appreciation of the extreme levels of hand craftsmanship invested in our products, and the Tufenkian values and practices that underlie their creation.

James Tufenkian, Founder

Weaving

Our carpets are hand-knotted. That is simply the best way to make a carpet. Not surprisingly it is also the hardest, and by far the most time consuming. Knotting is a craft that is almost impossible to comprehend from the viewpoint of our frantic and impatient world. A 9'x12' foot Tufenkian carpet is composed of up to 1.5 million individually hand-tied knots. 

Additional Crafts

Our yarn requires a high degree of skill and an enormous amount of human labor to hand card, and hand spin. While most carpet production in the world begins with machine-spun yarn - simple, fast, and consistent - we choose to expend almost as much labor in carding and spinning the yarn by hand as is required to weave it into a carpet. After spinning it is dyed in small pots by hand. While the design maps followed by our weavers are produced by computer, washing, shearing, and detailing of the carpets are still performed by hand.

Labor

Altogether more than 1,500 hours of artisanal workmanship is required to make each of our carpets perfectly imperfect, charmingly individual, and to create the almost magical connection between the finished carpet and those who share their lives with it. It is much more difficult, time-consuming, and costly to make our carpets this way. We choose to do it because it matters.

Materials

As important as craftsmanship are the materials we employ. While we love our silk and other natural fibers, wool is still the premier material for luxury carpets, and our fiber of choice. Our sheep are unruly, living in harsh environments pretty much the way they have for millennia, producing the wools that gave the historic carpets of each region their distinctive character. Not uniform in color or texture. Un-scoured and retaining their natural lanolin, they are the foundation for making rugs of outstanding integrity.