Rugs Take Center Stage at London Design Festival 2026

Rugs anchored some of the strongest presentations at London Design Festival 2026, and the designs on show stretched from Stockholm to Paris. Wallpaper* surveyed six new collections from the festival and beyond that sit, as the magazine put it, "at the intersection of art and textiles."

Christopher Farr

Christopher Farr's archival rug designs appeared alongside contemporary furniture from Max Radford Gallery in an exhibition titled 'Progressive Permanence.' The show, staged during the festival, mixed eras and geographic influences into a single interior dialogue.

Gallery founder Max Radford explained the curatorial logic to Wallpaper*: 'All the rugs have been chosen because we love them as individual textiles, but also love how they sit with the works from our roster of designers. It also enables us to put our designers on a platform with respected names of the 20th century, which is new for all of us. I think presenting these contemporary works alongside such heavy hitters reinforces our belief that the designers we work with can go on to become the respected names of the 21st century.'

Marc Phillips

American rug designer Marc Phillips presented three new pieces built around the idea of restraint: two hand-knotted Moroccan designs and one handwoven flatweave. All three share a palette of warm tones despite their different constructions and origins.

'Orah' is handwoven in wool, with irregular striped bands in brown, tan and rust that shift subtly in tone across the rug's width. 'Ziri' works a chevron pattern in brown wool. 'Mira' is the boldest of the trio, with a diamond and leaf motif in rust, tan, olive and dusty purple.

Floor Story

London rug designer Floor Story staged five rugs in an exhibition hosted with Spanish furniture maker Sancal and curated by interior designers Trifle*. The rugs, displayed in room settings furnished with Sancal pieces, came from Coco Lom, Les Keepers, Lakwena, POoR Collective and House of Quinn.

Two designs stand out. Jogakbo, by Les Keepers, focuses on the beauty of inconsistencies through delicate linework and patchworking; its intersecting, overlapping patterns read like a wild garden and reject linear composition. POoR Collective's rug celebrates London housing estates, translating tower-block architecture into a joyful, optimistic flatwoven pattern.

Collina Strada for Layered

Swedish design house Layered collaborated with New York-based fashion label Collina Strada on a collection of four hand-tufted rugs and two sofas in pink and green tones. The patterns draw directly on the label's history: one references the floor of Collina Strada's New York flagship store, another features the distinct plaid from the brand's AW26 runway.

The collection closes with flower-shaped structural rugs in different colourways, a departure from the geometric patterns that dominate contemporary rug design.

'In design, I'm interested in creating tension between opposing ideas: beauty and discomfort, fragility and strength, fantasy and realism,' says Hillary Taymour, founder and creative director of Collina Strada. 'I think fashion and design should evoke emotion and individuality rather than perfection.'

Nordic Knots

Nordic Knots' new collection, 'Dancing Flower and Matches', takes its cues from Swedish Grace, the early 20th-century Swedish design movement that celebrated simplicity and proportion. The brand shot the collection at Stockholm's Bio Skandia, a 1923 cinema designed by architect Gunnar Asplund, a setting that captures the rugs' organic yet graphic character.

The collection comprises two rugs. 'Dancing Flower' leans toward floral motifs and comes in warm sand or dusty blue. 'Matches' is more graphic, with rhythmic Art Deco geometric patterns and accents of golden bamboo silk.

Creative Matters

In Paris, RDAI and Creative Matters presented Zoomometry, a collection of six fine rugs replicating the microscopic workings of birds. Local practice RDAI, led by Denis Montel and Julia Capp, developed the rugs with Canadian manufacturer Creative Matters for Maison & Objet.

'The idea was not to design a carpet with a bird on it,' RDAI interior architect Johan Thuillou told Wallpaper*. He studied microscopic patterns of birds and flattened them into a renderable pattern.

The result reads as geometric yet biophilic, worked in Tibetan wool and Chinese silk in natural-looking colours ranging from bright coral to deep brown. The collection is now on display at Galerie Mouvements Modernes.

Across London, Stockholm and Paris, the week's launches point to a category shedding its supporting role: rug designers are now borrowing directly from fashion runways, architectural surveys and microscope imagery, and galleries are placing the results beside 20th-century canon.