Vanessa Habib
Floor coverings in all their variety and colour have been little studied and since many of them were susceptible to wear and damage we can now only guess at the impact they had in a room when new, or look at paintings of interiors where the freshness of pattern has been preserved. Scotch carpets, for example, are still so little known that the name is often thought to refer to any carpet made in Scotland. In fact they were a specific flat woven carpet with a long history, a popular domestic furnishing for at least 200 years from the 1720s onwards.