Moroccan rug sizes: why they run long and narrow
Old Moroccan rugs are often about twice as long as they are wide. Where that shape comes from, why no two measure the same, and how to fit one to a room.
Most vintage Moroccan rugs are long and narrow, often close to twice as long as they are wide. A Middle Atlas pile rug of about 180 by 330 centimetres, six feet by eleven, is an ordinary shape. Square rugs are rare, and the standard Western sizes, five by eight, eight by ten, almost never turn up exactly.
The shape comes from the houses the rugs were made for, and from what they were made to do. None of them was woven to a size chart. Each was woven for a room and a family, and measured afterwards.
Start with the room. In the old town houses of Fes and Marrakech, the rooms sit around a courtyard, one on each side. Alfred Bel, describing a fourteenth-century house in Fes in 1919, noted rooms that were wide but not deep: long along the courtyard, shallow behind it. The Metropolitan Museum in New York keeps a nineteenth-century carpet attributed to Rabat that measures 363 by 178 centimetres, and its catalogue puts that elongated format down to the long, narrow living spaces of Moroccan houses.
Rabat carpets were city carpets, made on Ottoman models for town houses. The mountain rugs had another job. In the Middle Atlas a pile rug was bedding: something to sleep on and something to sleep under. Women wove them for their own families, and in the cold villages the pile was high and the knots loose, so that the rug behaved like a sheepskin. A blanket is long because a person is long. Two metres or so of length, a body and a little more, and a width that covers a sleeper or two. Many of the rugs that now lie in living rooms abroad began that way.
The loom set the rest. Rugs were woven at home, on an upright loom built to the work and the space. Dealers often say that the width of a house's loom set the width of its rugs, and that is likely, though nobody has counted it. What is certain is that the weaver worked without a drawing and wove to the end of the warp, and that no two rugs from the same village come out quite the same size.
This is why a Moroccan rug is sold by its measurements, not by a category. Hand-woven edges wander. A rug can be a few centimetres wider at one end than the other, and a pile rug relaxes once it has lain flat for a while. Measure it yourself, in more than one place, and expect the numbers to differ a little.
Fitting one to a room is mostly a matter of floor. In a sitting room, the usual advice is to leave a band of bare floor between the rug and the walls, enough to read as a frame, and to let the front legs of the sofa and chairs rest on the rug so the group holds together. A long Moroccan rug works best along the length of a room, the way it was meant to lie, rather than turned across it.
Under a bed, the long shape helps. Laid crosswise under the lower two-thirds of the bed, a rug of two metres or more leaves wool on both sides to step onto in the morning, which is close to what it was made for. Under a dining table, the rug wants to be big enough that a chair pulled back to sit down stays on it; a rug that ends at the table's edge catches the chair legs every meal.
Hallways take the narrowest pieces. A runner does not need to touch the walls. A hand's width of floor on each side looks calmer than a rug pushed to the skirting.
The odd sizes are not a fault to work around. They are a record of the house the rug was woven in: the length of a room, the height of a sleeper, the frame of one woman's loom.