Thibault Van Renne
Thibault Van Renne inspecting hand-dyed wool and silk yarns hanging in the dyeing shed, the material palette of the atelier

Materials in 2026

Materials in 2026

A Thibault Van Renne hand-knotted carpet is built almost entirely from natural fibres. Below is every one of them: what it is, where we source it, and what it does on the loom and under foot.

This palette stays the same in 2026: regional wool, natural mulberry silk, Himalayan Allo nettle, and, since 2018, one carpet with real 18-carat gold wire; still no synthetic pile and no hemp.

Wool, region by region

Wool is the foundation of a TVR carpet. Its character changes with the region, and we keep it that way deliberately: one wool takes dye with more depth, another wears harder, another shades more visibly.

Tibetan highland wool (used in our Nepalese pieces)

  • Sourced in Tibet: long-staple mountain wool from high-altitude flocks
  • Hand-carded and hand-spun in Kathmandu, Nepal
  • Lustrous, takes dye with depth, and ages slowly

Bikaner wool (used in our finest Indian pieces)

  • From local Rajasthani sheep in and around Bikaner, a region historically renowned for the quality of its wool
  • Hand-carded and hand-spun in Bikaner itself
  • The spun yarn then travels to Jaipur to be dyed
  • Used in our finest hand-knotted work, and in our highest knot counts (up to 225 kpsi; see Craftsmanship)

Kashmir wool

  • Regular sheep wool from the Kashmir region, not pashmina goat (a different fibre entirely)
  • Sturdy, durable, built to be walked on for decades

Afghan Ghazni wool

  • From Ghazni province in Afghanistan, woven in Afghanistan and finished in Pakistan
  • Famous for its heavy abrash: the dramatic natural shading of the same hue within a single piece
  • A more visibly hand-made surface than the more controlled wools, and that is the point

Silk

In most of our collections we use natural mulberry silk (Bombyx mori). When a particular design calls for a more rustic look, we mix it with wild silk, spun from a different silkworm species, with more visible irregularity in the thread.

Sourcing:

  • Our Indian production uses silk from a small silk house in Bangalore
  • Our Nepalese production uses silk imported from China

Silk usually goes into the colour highlights of a piece: the difference in lustre between wool and silk is what catches the light and brings the design forward.

When we deviate from natural silk for a specific collection, we use bamboo silk, and we say so on that collection. Bamboo silk shines, but it is a viscose: bamboo pulp dissolved and regenerated into thread. It is not animal silk, and we never call it silk without the word bamboo in front of it.

Nettle: the Himalayan giant nettle

Our nettle comes from Allo, the Himalayan giant nettle (Girardinia diversifolia), a plant that grows only in the Himalayas, at high altitude. It is also imported from Nepal to our Indian atelier for collections like our ETHNIC line.

How we prepare it:

  • The fibre is drawn from the inside of the stem
  • It is boiled in water with a specific tea that enhances the natural tone of the fibre
  • We purify the nettle to remove the darkest tones (the deep browns and blacks) to give a softer, more even palette
  • The result is a soft gradation of tone along the fibre, an abrash we never have to dye in

Two facts to know about nettle:

  • It cannot be dyed. Its colour is always natural, which is why the preparation step matters as much as it does
  • It takes about 1.5× the time of wool to hand-spin a kilo. It is a rougher fibre, especially on the spinner's hands

We often blend nettle with wool. The wool brings sturdiness and softness; the nettle brings the natural shading that no dye can imitate. The first carpets we ever wove with nettle, in 2008, became our NATURE collection. See Innovation 2008.

Gold

Most of the gold-thread work in our GOLDEN LEGENDS collection is woven with Lurex: a metal foil wrapped around a cotton-thread core. We use a kelim flatweave technique for the Lurex sections, so the gold passes appear as shimmering flat panels within the hand-knotted body of the carpet.

We have also woven one piece using real 18-carat gold drawn as wire, knotted directly into the rug as a structural element. That commission was the world's first hand-knotted carpet using real gold fibre. See Innovation 2018 for the full story.

Gold is sourced from Rajasthan, historically a centre for both the highest-quality hand-knotted carpets and the Indian gold and jewellery trade.

Cotton

Cotton appears in our work in two specific places:

  • As the core thread inside the Lurex used for our GOLDEN LEGENDS gold work
  • As the backing of our tufted carpets for large hospitality and hotel projects (see the tufted scoping in Sustainability and Craftsmanship)

We do not use cotton as a primary fibre in our hand-knotted carpets.

Linen

We work with linen in some collections, but only in small areas, never as the main material. Linen reflects light differently from wool and silk, and we use it to create specific contrasts inside the design.

What we do not use in our hand-knotted line

  • Petroleum-based synthetic pile (polyester, nylon, acrylic)
  • Hemp: too rough on the hand, the colour leans yellowish-green, and it is very hard to clean. We tested it and chose against it.

Tufted line: a different palette

For our tufted carpets, made for large hospitality and hotel projects, the materials are different from our hand-knotted work, and we are open about it:

  • Primary fibre is usually New Zealand wool
  • On request, the primary fibre can be specified as TENCEL (particularly sturdy for high-traffic spaces) or viscose
  • Backing is cotton, fixed with the glue that every tufted carpet in the world uses

The tufted line is a separate product category. We do not claim it sits on the same sustainability or material standards as the hand-knotted work. See Sustainability for the full scoping.

See also

That is the full palette of the hand-knotted work. Nothing else goes into a TVR carpet. The tufted line uses different materials, set out in its own section.

Thibault Van Renne, Founder