Behind the Collection
Behind the Collection
Every collection begins long before the loom. It starts with a question. What does comfort look like when you strip away everything unnecessary?
Charlotte Engstrom, Art Director
I never set out to design rugs. I set out to understand materials. Where they come from, how they feel in your hands, what happens when light moves across them at different times of day. The rugs came later, once I understood what I was working with.
This is a window into that process. Not the polished final product, but the searching, the wandering, the moments of recognition that eventually become a collection.
Chapter One
Studio & Sketches
Where every collection begins. Pencil on paper, fabric on the wall, color swatches spread across the floor.
It Starts on Paper
Before anything is woven, it is drawn. I sketch constantly. Quick gestures, not finished compositions. I am looking for rhythm, for the way a line wants to repeat, for the moment a pattern becomes inevitable rather than decorative.
Most sketches never become rugs. But they all teach me something about proportion, about restraint, about when to stop.
The first line is never the right one. That is why you draw a hundred.
Color is a feeling before it is a decision.
The Reveal
There is a moment where the design stops being abstract and starts becoming real. When you pin the reference images next to the sketches next to the fiber samples and something clicks. That is the moment I live for. Not the finished rug, but the moment you realize it could exist.
The studio at golden hour. When the light is right, you see the colors as they truly are.
“A sketch is a conversation with yourself. You do not know what you think until you see it on paper.”
Charlotte Engstrom
Chapter Two
Research & Books
Conversations with people I will never meet. Textile histories, exhibition catalogs, architectural journals.
Reading the World
My library is full of textile histories, architectural journals, exhibition catalogs. I return to the same books again and again. Not for answers, but to remind myself of the questions.
How did Persian weavers encode meaning into geometry? What made William Morris believe a rug could reform an entire household? Every collection is shaped by these conversations.
The studio reference library. Some of these books have traveled with me since university.
Chapter Three
Museum & Art
Four hundred years between us. The questions are still the same.
Learning From the Past
I spend more time in museums than showrooms. You learn more from a 400-year-old Mughal carpet fragment than from any contemporary trade fair. The way artisans encoded entire cosmologies into pattern. The restraint of Japanese textiles. The exuberance of Ottoman court carpets.
I am not interested in reproducing the past. I want to understand the principles behind it and carry those principles forward.
Chapter Four
Nature Inspiration
My best ideas do not happen at a desk. They happen outdoors, studying how textures shift in the late afternoon.
Walking & Looking
A beach in Oman, studying how sand textures change with the wind. A botanical garden, noticing how bark patterns create rhythm without repetition. I collect textures the way other people collect photographs. Most never become rugs. But they all become part of how I see.
Every palette already exists somewhere in nature.
Geometry is never invented. It is observed.
The desert taught me that emptiness is not absence. It is space for the eye to rest.
“Design is not what it looks like. Design is what it feels like under your feet at six in the morning.”
Charlotte Engstrom
Chapter Five
Architecture Inspiration
Every rug I design starts with the space it will live in. Not the room, the architecture of the room.
Architecture is frozen music, and a rug is its accompaniment.
Building With Softness
I am drawn to architecture because it teaches you about proportion, about how materials meet, about the conversation between light and surface. A Brutalist building has as much to teach me as a Moorish palace. Both understand that a single material, used with confidence, is more powerful than a dozen used without conviction.
A tile maker in Fez and a weaver in Bhadohi share the same instinct for repetition.
Concrete taught me restraint. One material, used honestly, is enough.
Where the walls tell stories, I listen.
A rug is never finished. Even after it leaves the loom, it continues to change. Light changes it. Use changes it. The way a family lives on it changes it. That is what makes handmade objects different. They have a life of their own.
Thank you for being interested in the process. It makes the work more meaningful knowing it is not invisible.
Charlotte