The Rug Company

Intricate, romantic, extraordinary, the ‘Home’ cushion by Committee for The Rug Company encapsulates its philosophy of combining exceptional craftsmanship with forward thinking design. The highly detailed background scene owes its intricacy to the finely hand woven wool tap estry, which contrasts the bright hues and different textures of the hand stitched appliqué house.

Committee says of the imaginative design, ‘Sometimes you design something and you can't honestly say exactly why. You know what it is about, you know what it means to you, it just doesn't have a completely logical reason for being. That's how it is with the 'Home' cushion. It’s a picture really; meant to evoke a feeling, in this case a sense of home. But it isn't just any home, it’s The Home, the perfect home, the dream home. Maybe the home you go to when you die; the home you stitched yourself.

To portray the almost heavenly location of the house, we borrowed an antique tapestry design of an idealised, romantic landscape with exotic birds perched in the trees. We then appliquéd eclectic fabrics (silks, wools, cottons in different textures) to the surface to create a little house of archetypal shape, made of magical, coloured tiles. The house sits there gamely, in vivid juxtaposition to the landscape; a pop imposition in the earthy tones of the tapestry. This unexpected interruption to the background is a portal that allows your imagination into the picture, to inhabit the landscape. It’s like the holiday scene in Mary Poppins.’