MILAN — When New York-to Morocco-based Beni Rugs’ operations director Afaf Chouhaid stumbled on a small atelier in Rabat, she discovered an almost extinct technique preserved through generations that generally had been reserved for palace interiors and Moroccan nobility.
Beni Rugs’ founders Robert Wright and Tiberio Lobo-Navia decided to integrate this into their latest collection, Chelsea, which elevates their product to true, slow luxury status.
More demanding than anything else Beni employs, a single 8-by-10-foot rug made with this method involves more than one million handwoven knots and six months of work, compared with the more commonplace rugs made in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, made traditionally by women and entirely by hand with 172,000 knots.
“Few things in a home are made this slowly, or by so few hands, ” Wright said, adding that it was the first time the company experimented with dense colors like black.
Named for designer Colin King’s Chelsea apartment, the collection reflects Beni’s Moroccan craft heritage through a contemporary lens. As Beni’s artistic director at large, King drew from a stream of references: the ironwork of a gate, the geometry of a mosaic, medallions from ceremonial trays and the movement of a leaf. The collection was shot at Franca Sozzani’s riad, “Casa Franca,” providing a rare look inside the late editor’s once private home.
King told WWD what attracted him most about Beni’s business model is the female-first mindset.
“I think preserving this craft, this tradition, really rearranging the supply chain, putting women at the front of it rather than at the tail end of it is really what separates Beni. They provide childcare, meals, transportation, healthcare for these women as a viable job and career,” he said, adding that for him, this is true luxury.
“I think we are really interested in just pushing forward the craft. And, you know, I’m so much more interested in somebody spending six months tying a million knots than making other categories within our business.”
Prices range from $2,400 for a 3-by-5-foot rug to $28,800 for a 12-by-15-foot rug, shoppable on Beni Rugs’ website and at their showrooms in Marrakech and New York City in TriBeCa.