ELEGANT CARPETS WITH KATIE RIDDER

In April we were delighted to celebrate what was both the successful installation of another spiral staircase runner and our first collaboration with renowned New York designer Katie Ridder. Katie’s projects have captured the covers of Architectural Digest and House Beautiful among others and a book about her work entitled Katie Ridder: More Rooms was released in 2020. Katie is widely admired for her bold but very sensitive play with colour and patterning and our work together on this hospitality project explores it well.

As you can imagine, spiral staircase runners are complex to design and produce. This runner was handtufted in 100% wool in Thailand. The project also included hallway runners made by the dye injection method in Denmark, and six handknotted area rugs made in Afghanistan.

The Creative Matters staircase runner and corresponding hallway runner.

Kat Pezzano was the Creative Matters designer responsible for the staircase runner and corresponding hallway runner while Madeleine Baigent worked on the handknotted rugs. “The initial design process for this project involved pulling more traditional designs from our archives,” said Madeleine. “The clients chose the designs from a package we compiled of around 20 traditional concepts. Once designs were selected we worked to recolour them into a palette of blues and greens, with some creamy golds and more traditional reds.”

“The staircase runner has one motif and the hallway runner has a different but related motif,” said Kat. “For the handtufted staircase, a lot of work went into keeping the points from the motifs nice and fine. It took careful troubleshooting with our artwork and also with tufting techniques to achieve the delicate look they have.”

Artwork showing the delicate points on the staircase motif.

Note how the motif artwork translated into handtufted wool. Photo:

Spiral staircases are particularly tricky to carpet because the steps have different shapes and measurements. Although we call it a “runner,” there are in fact numerous separate pieces of carpet involved. As you can see in the artwork below, for the 32 steps from the first to the second floor, 21 of those steps were handtufted individually and 11 were tufted in one piece.

Artwork showing the many pieces required for this spiral staircase.

For the six area rugs, two designs were chosen each with its own palette. The “blue” rugs had a range of five greens, two blues, and a paler cream colour. And the bolder entry carpets used three blues, three greens, a rich red and a mid-gold tone. The client wanted traditional elements such as borders and geometric motifs.

The beautiful handknotted “blue” rugs have a colour palette of five greens, two blues and a cream.

The Creative Matters design for the entry rugs used three blues, three greens, a rich red and a mid-gold tone.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with Katie and her colleague Hillary Paulen to refresh this rich traditional space with a bright clean palette, and to share with them our expertise in the technicalities of spiral staircases. If you wish to see another of our stunning spiral staircases, check out this blog post from 2019.