Carpeting your home adds warmth and comfort. To me it seems a quintessentially British standard to carpet the floors in your home but of course carpets, in the form of rugs, have more exotic origins. Wall to wall carpeting including stair carpets wasn’t commonplace until fairly recently. In fact it took a long time for the Europeans to even begin to put carpet on the floor; in its manifestations in Europe it appeared on walls and tables. Here we’ll look at a very brief history behind the modern phenomena of stair carpets.
Today when we fit carpet in our homes this generally involves putting together multiple carpet tiles in seamless sequence until the floor is covered wall to wall. We also most usually install carpet into the living room, bedrooms and perhaps the dining room but it’s not unheard of to carpet the hallways, bathroom and even put down stair carpets. Extensive carpeting can add to the warmth of your home- certainly it eliminates the dread we all feel of getting out of bed and putting your feet on the cold ground.
However this wasn’t always the done thing. The history of how we came to the point where we fit stair carpets began in the East. The earliest example of a pile carpet was found in Siberia has been estimated to date back to the 5th or 4th century BC. This rug, known as the “Pazyryk Carpet”, is thought to be of Armenian production. More examples from Armenia date from the 2nd or 3rd century, backing up the theory that this is the site of the origin of carpet making. Such examples were not used as stair carpets though. They were highly ornamental, being rich in design and material. They were used not only to cover floors but also as wall hangings, thrown over sofas, chairs, beds and even tables but not as stair carpets.
Rugs and carpets only reached Europe when we began to trade with the West. At first we used Persian or other rugs in the same decorative way, on walls etc but slowly this changed. In England we began making our own carpets in the 16th and 17th century A.D. in Norwich. From this point we adapted the production methods and uses of rugs and floor coverings to suit our needs, transitioning carpets from decorative items to functional ones which are added to our homes for comfort. So today when we install stair carpets we are upholding millennia of craftsmanship.
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