Moroccan rugs and mid-century furniture: teak, walnut and Atlas wool
Why cream Moroccan wool and mid-century teak and walnut have shared a floor since Aalto's Villa Mairea, and how to set the pair in a room today.
In 1939, in a pine forest in western Finland, Alvar and Aino Aalto finish a house for their friends Maire and Harry Gullichsen. It is all timber, rattan, brick and long low windows, the newest kind of house in Europe. On the ground floor, across the big open rooms, they lay Moroccan carpets. Artek, the company the Aaltos and Maire Gullichsen founded, still describes them the way anyone standing there would: a soothing thing under the feet, and a quiet in rooms that would otherwise ring.
That is the whole reason the pairing works, and it was settled before the word mid-century meant anything. Modern furniture is lean. It stands on legs, it shows its joints, it leaves air around itself. A room furnished that way is beautiful and a little cold, and it echoes. A thick wool rug from the Atlas does the opposite of everything the furniture does. It is soft where the chair is hard, irregular where the cabinet is exact, warm where the window is glass. Neither one tries to be the other.
The Aaltos were not alone. Dwell traces the habit to Le Corbusier, who put Beni Ourain carpets into the Villa La Roche in Paris in the 1920s, and notes a 1938 photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater with another on the floor. By the time Charles and Ray Eames launched their lounge chair with Herman Miller in 1956, in rosewood and black leather, the cream Moroccan rug was already part of the modern room's furniture, and designers of that generation kept laying them down.
Wood is where the pair comes alive. Teak and walnut, the woods of a Danish sideboard or an American credenza, are warm brown with a red or honey undertone. Set them on undyed Atlas wool, which is never really white but the colour of milk with a little tea in it, and both look richer. The thin dark lines of a Beni Ourain lattice pick up the grain of the wood and the black of a steel leg. The rug and the cabinet start to look as if they were chosen for each other, which, in a way, a whole century of rooms has done.
Then the legs. Mid-century pieces stand high off the floor on tapered or splayed legs, so the rug runs underneath them and stays in sight. That is a gift: a sofa on slim legs shows the whole field of wool, and a low teak coffee table seems to float over it. Let the front legs of the sofa and the chairs rest on the rug and the back legs on the floor, or bring everything fully onto a large one, and keep a margin of bare boards around the edge. In a living room that usually means something near 200 by 300 centimetres, larger if the seating is generous.
Colour can go further than cream. A walnut room with a mustard chair or a bottle-green lamp takes a Boujad well, the faded rose and apricot rugs from the plains near Khouribga, because the warmth in the wood answers the warmth in the wool. A darker Beni M'Guild, plum and deep red, sits low and heavy under rosewood and leather, the way an old armchair sits in a study. The rule is only to let one thing carry the pattern. If the rug is loud, the upholstery stays plain.
Pile matters in this kind of room. A deep, shaggy Beni Ourain gives the most contrast with sharp furniture, and it is wonderful to walk on, but it swallows thin legs and makes a desk chair hard to roll. Under a dining table or a desk, a lower, older pile or a flatweave keeps the furniture steady. In front of a lounge chair, where the feet go first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the deep one belongs.
Light finishes it. Mid-century rooms were made for daylight, big panes, low sills. In the afternoon the sun comes in sideways, the wool throws long shadows from every knot, and the teak goes the colour of strong tea. In the evening a single lamp on a walnut table turns the cream to gold.
The gallery's Beni Ourain pieces are measured to the centimetre on every side, and the cream ones with thin lines are the ones that meet teak most easily.