One will last generations. The other won't. Here's how to tell them apart before you buy. Both are described as handmade in most showrooms, and technically both are. The difference is in what is holding the rug together, and it determines almost everything about how the piece will age.
Knotting
On a knotted rug, every tuft of pile is tied around two warp threads and locked in place by the weft rows above and below it. There is no adhesive anywhere in the structure. The rug is a single woven textile, which is why a knotted piece can be washed, repaired, reduced in size, or rewoven at the edges a century after it was made.
“There is no adhesive anywhere in a knotted rug. That single fact decides everything about how it ages.”
Tufting
On a tufted rug, loops of yarn are punched through a stretched fabric backing with a handheld gun. Nothing holds them except a coat of latex adhesive and a second backing glued over the top. The technique is fast — days rather than months — and that is the entire commercial case for it. It is also the failure point.
Latex degrades. Somewhere between ten and twenty years in, depending on humidity and cleaning history, the adhesive becomes brittle, the secondary backing separates, and the rug begins to shed. There is no repair for this; the construction cannot be reversed.
The thirty-second test
Fold a corner back and look at the reverse. Knots visible as discrete points of colour, pattern legible from behind: knotted. Flat cloth backing that conceals the construction, sometimes with a faint chemical smell: tufted. Fringe woven into the body: knotted. Fringe stitched on: almost always tufted.
When tufted is the right answer
A playroom floor. A rental. A room whose scheme will change in five years. Tufted rugs are not a scam and we will happily tell a client when one is the sensible purchase. What they are not is an heirloom, and they should never be sold or priced as though they were.
