Laura Ashley

Laura Ashley Rugs: A British Archive, Woven Into the Floor

In 1953, Laura and Bernard Ashley began screen-printing headscarves and tea towels on a kitchen table in their Pimlico flat. Laura had spent an afternoon at the Victoria & Albert Museum looking at a Women's Institute handicrafts exhibition and came away with a clear idea about what British domestic design was missing — something pretty, considered, and grounded in the natural world rather than the machine. What followed was one of the more unlikely brand trajectories in British design history: from a kitchen table in south London to a company with stores across four continents and an archive of over 100,000 pieces of original artwork, textiles and printed material, now preserved in a working salt mine in Cheshire.

That archive is not merely a historical record. The design team works through it at the start of every collection — pulling prints from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s, running them against current colour forecasts and interior trends, then rebuilding them into new pieces that carry the original visual logic without feeling like replicas. The result, across the rug collection produced in partnership with Dutch manufacturer Brink & Campman, is a range that sits equally well in a freshly renovated Victorian terrace and a newly built contemporary interior.

The Patterns

The collection divides loosely into three territories. The floral designs — among them Josette, which traces back to an antique printed silk in the archive and combines damask structure with rose bouquets on a jacquard loom — are the most immediately recognisable as Laura Ashley. The Parterre comes from a hand-painted artwork in the archive: an ogee stem pattern carrying clusters of white flowers that reads as botanical illustration translated into wool pile. Silchester takes an Arts and Crafts approach, with leaf outlines in a hand-drawn linear frame — quieter than the florals, and more suited to rooms where the pattern needs to hold its place without dominating.

Alongside the archive-led designs, the collection includes geometric and trellis patterns, plain weaves, and stripe constructions — pieces that work as supporting layers beneath bolder furnishings or as the primary visual element in a more restrained scheme. The colour palette across the full range runs from soft dove grey, pale sage, and blush through to richer navy, deep teal, and warm terracotta, covering the full breadth of the Laura Ashley paint and fabric ranges with which the rugs are designed to coordinate.

Construction and Materials

Across the collection, Brink & Campman use hand-tufted New Zealand wool as the primary material, with viscose used selectively in border and pattern areas where a sheen is needed to lift the design under interior light. The Josette rug is woven on a jacquard loom in cotton chenille — a different construction that gives the finished piece a flatter, more structured surface appropriate to its formal damask pattern. Some designs incorporate bamboo silk alongside wool for added softness and a subtle lustre in the pile. These are not interchangeable choices; each material decision is driven by what the particular pattern requires to read correctly at floor level and at scale.

The Laura Ashley rug collection is available in the UK through SayRug — one of the few UK stockists carrying the full range, with the brand's coordinating paint, fabric, and wallpaper collections held alongside it for those working on a complete room scheme.