A Rum Fellow’s Elsewhere Was Woven in a Building Designed to Let People In

Rugs & Textiles · Kathmandu

Reading Time: 12 minutes

A Rum Fellow’s new hand-knotted rug collection, Elsewhere, is built on moons, ladders, waves and root networks, and on a quieter idea about thresholds. It was woven at Karuna in Kathmandu, a facility designed so that weavers who had been shut out of the trade by the loom itself could get to it. The two halves of that sentence turn out to be the same story.

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A Rum Fellow has spent twelve years going to places where weaving already happens and building a business around the people it finds there. Bolivia first, then Peru, then Guatemala, then India. Elsewhere, the studio’s new hand-knotted rug collection, does something harder. It was woven in Kathmandu in a building that had to be designed before the weaving could start, because the people who make these rugs had been shut out of the trade by the loom itself.

The loom is the obstacle, and nobody was treating it as a design problem

A Tibetan hand-knotted rug is made on an upright loom. Two beams, a wall of warp threads under tension, and a weaver sitting on a plank bench in front of them. The work starts at the bottom and climbs. As the rug grows, the plank is raised, which means the weaver’s body has to move up with it, over and over, for the weeks or months a single rug takes.

Read that description again as an access question and the problem is obvious. The bench moves. The weaver has to get on and off it, at height, all day. For someone with a spinal injury, a mobility impairment or a wheelchair, that is not a question of skill or willingness. It is a question of furniture and floor levels, and it had never been treated as one.

The answer sits in Tarakeshwor, on the northern edge of Kathmandu. It is called the Karuna Universal Weaving Facility, it was completed in 2023, and it is a project of EPSA Nepal, which stands for Entire Power in Social Action, together with the carpet manufacturer Karnor. Karuna is the Sanskrit word for compassion.

What universal design means when the product is a carpet

EPSA was founded by Sangita Pant, who has spent fifteen years building vocational training, employment and housing for Nepali people with disabilities, and particularly for disabled women living in poverty. Karuna is the weaving arm of that, and it was drawn around the looms rather than the looms being squeezed into a building. Malene Barnett has been making a version of the same argument in New York since 2018 with the Black Artists and Designers Guild, which is that the barrier is almost never talent and almost always infrastructure.

So: level landings, a platform lift with its call button mounted at seated reach rather than standing reach, handrails where the level changes, looms with clear floor on every side, bench and loom geometry worked out for weavers who cannot simply climb a plank. The light is daylight from tall windows, which matters when the work is reading a one-to-one cartoon taped along the top of the warp and matching colour at close range. Thirty-six weavers at Karuna are certified artisans who identify as having disabilities, ranging from mobility and hearing impairments to blindness.

The training runs six months and ends in certification, awarded in March 2024 at a ceremony presided over by Tenzing Sherpa, president of the Nepal Carpet Manufacturers and Exporters Association. That detail matters more than it looks. It means the qualification is the industry’s own, not a parallel certificate for a parallel scheme, and it means these weavers are employable anywhere in Nepalese carpet manufacturing. Karuna was shortlisted for the Zero Project, the international award for work that removes barriers for people with disabilities, in 2024.

The residences are in the same compound. Fulmaya Tamang, who weaves there, describes what that is worth in a single flat sentence: “Once we’re done with work, we don’t have to commute elsewhere to live.” Kathmandu is a city of broken pavements, open drains and stairs. Taking the commute out of the day is an architectural decision with more effect on a working life than almost anything that happens at the loom. Hassan Fathy made the same point about housing in Egypt sixty years ago, that the building is what decides what a person can do with a day.

The rod is the reason the surface moves

The collection’s texture comes from one tool, and it is worth understanding because it explains what you are looking at.

In Tibetan knotting, the weaver does not tie each knot and cut it. She lays a metal rod horizontally across the warps and loops the yarn around two warp threads and over the rod, working along the row. When the row is finished she runs a knife along the rod, and the loops release as cut pile. Leave the loops uncut and you have loop pile instead. The diameter of the rod is the pile height.

Which means that the “varying pile heights and distinct loop-knot structures” the studio describes are not a finishing effect applied afterwards. They are decisions made at the loom, row by row, by swapping rods and choosing where to cut. A field that reads as flat and matte beside a motif that catches the light is two different rods and two different knives in the same rug. This is skilled work being asked of weavers six months out of training, and the surfaces hold up.

The wool is handspun Tibetan, kept high in lanolin so the yarn stays resilient and takes dye with a slightly uneven, living quality rather than a flat one. Silk is worked into the motifs, which is why the ghost shapes in several of these rugs appear and disappear as you cross the room. The pile is doing one thing and the silk is doing another. Vanessa Barragão works the same seam from the other end, in recycled yarn, where the behaviour of the fibre does half the drawing.

Ten designs, and the three that carry the idea

Elsewhere runs to ten pieces: seven field designs and three borders. The shared language is celestial and botanical, drawn in a loose, sketched hand. Moons, stars, leaves, ladders, waves, root systems. Nothing is rendered tightly enough to become a motif you could name, which is the point.

Murmur is the clearest statement of it. Across a bone ground, soft blocks of ochre, clay and deep brown slide over one another like planes of a landscape seen through weather, with a crescent moon, a scatter of stars and two white leaf forms set into them. It reads as a composition that has drifted apart and settled slightly out of register.

Portal is the one that explains the collection’s title. It is circular, the only circular piece here, and it is organised like a chart: a wedge of sand, a wedge of olive, a sliver of grey-blue, a small gold crescent low down and an eight-pointed star in the upper field, with a scatter of marks between them that sit somewhere between a constellation and a diagram. A circular rug has no front. You walk onto it from any side, which is an unusually literal piece of design thinking for a piece about doors into other worlds.

Aether goes the other way, into rhythm. The whole field is a dense repeat of dark leaf or wave forms marching in rows across a deep teal ground, a pattern that reads almost as a textile length rather than a rug. Seen across a room it behaves like water.

The rest fill out the argument. Veil is a painterly grid of floating panels, half of them patterned, half of them empty. Cascade sends leaf shapes falling through an open field. Liminal traces interlocking paths and root networks in a tight graphic repeat. Pulse arranges moons and stars in a circular composition.

The three borders, Realm, Marea and Yonder, do the quietest and most useful work. Each leaves a large plain field and concentrates the drawing at the edge: a wave curling in from one corner on Marea, a ruled band and blocks of colour on Realm, a fine repeating edge on Yonder. These are the pieces that will actually go under furniture in a room that already has enough going on, and they are the ones a specifier will reach for first. Rag rugs did something comparable in the Nordic Pavilion at this year’s Biennale, where the floor was asked to hold a room together rather than perform in it.

A collection about thresholds, made where one was taken out

Here is the thing that makes this more than a good rug launch.

Elsewhere is a collection about liminal space. Its own designs are named Liminal and Portal. Its stated subject is the moment of passing between one state and another, the sliding door, the threshold you cross into somewhere not quite known.

It was woven in a building whose entire design purpose was to take a threshold out. Level floors, no step at the door, a rail where you need one, a bench you can actually reach. The metaphor the collection is built on is the literal thing the architecture does. I do not think that was planned, and it is better for not being planned. Haya Jarrar built a whole London debut out of the neighbouring question, which is what an object has to do before a place becomes yours.

The weavers describe the same shift in their own terms. Tikaram Guragain, who works at the facility, talks about wanting support to continue into higher education. Mina Nepali puts the commercial case more plainly than any brand would dare: “We hope to receive more orders. We want to weave more.” Another weaver at the facility puts it better than any of us could. “May our hands never be stagnant.”

Where this sits in twelve years of A Rum Fellow

Caroline Lindsell and Dylan O’Shea, who are partners, started A Rum Fellow in 2013, Lindsell coming to it from fashion and textile design. The early collections were Bolivian and Peruvian; the studio found its voice in Guatemala, where the founders met a weaver at the side of the road who introduced them to her community, and that group still produces for them. The aesthetic that came out of it is bold colour and layered pattern, worked through backstrap looms and brocade.

Elsewhere is quieter than that. The palette runs through mineral earths, dusk blues and faded neutrals, and the drawing is looser. Put it next to the studio’s Guatemalan work and it looks like a different hand. Put it next to the method and it is the same studio doing the same thing it always does, which is to go somewhere, work with the people who are there, and let what they can make shape what gets designed.

The studio is a certified B Corporation and works with Label STEP, the Swiss fair trade organisation for the handmade carpet industry, and with GoodWeave. Label STEP is also one of the bodies that supported Karuna’s certification, which is as good an explanation as any of how a studio in Somerset ended up weaving in Tarakeshwor. Lindsell is Creative Director and describes wanting the collection to feel “alive, like escaping into a story, something ethereal and quietly magical”. O’Shea frames the other half of it, the fair wages, the inclusive working conditions and the preservation of traditional skills, as the principles the studio was built on rather than an addition to them.

The rugs are bespoke and made to order, with a lead time from fourteen weeks. The showroom is on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill and the design studio is in Frome, Somerset.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Most rug collections ask you to look at the surface. This one rewards looking at the surface and then looking at how it was arrived at, and the two readings turn out to be the same reading.

The texture in these rugs, the way a matte field sits against a motif that catches the light, is the work of a weaver choosing a rod and deciding where to run the knife. The reason that weaver is at the loom at all is that somebody treated a plank bench as a design problem rather than a fact of life. Both of those are craft decisions. Neither of them is visible unless you know to look.

What A Rum Fellow has done here is the thing the studio has quietly been doing since 2013, which is to let the people who make the work shape what the work is. The difference with Elsewhere is that this time the making had to be designed first.