Thibault Van Renne
Thibault Van Renne, founder of the atelier, in front of a hand-knotted carpet from the LEGENDS collection

Our Story

Our Story

From 1974 to today.

In 1974, my father, Luc Van Renne, came home from the Middle East with carpets.

He had been travelling for months, buying nothing at first, and he came back convinced there was a trade in it. The pieces he brought back were old, hand-knotted, made by people whose names we would never know but whose work we could read in the wool: the tension of the knots, the natural variations in the dye, the small irregularities that machines do not make.

He began importing. Quietly at first, then steadily. It became his trade.

I grew up among carpets: rolled, stacked, laid flat. I learned to recognise good wool by smell. By the time I was old enough to leave home, the question was not whether I would work with carpets. It was where I would go to learn.

The Journey East

So I went.

With my father Luc Van Renne, on our first trip to Iran together, at the loom of a carpet weaver we had come to learn from.

Iran. Pakistan. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. I sat with weavers. I watched dye baths come up to colour. I learned what hand-spun wool feels like compared to mill yarn, and why the difference matters when you put a carpet under sunlight for ten years.

What I came home with was not a business plan. It was a conviction: that the hand-knotted carpet (the real one, the one that takes a weaver close to a year to finish) was becoming rare, and that rare things deserve someone who refuses to let them go.

The Atelier

In 2006, I founded Thibault Van Renne.

The proposition was simple, and it has not changed: every carpet we make is hand-knotted, on a vertical loom, by master weavers. We work almost entirely in natural fibres: hand-spun wool, mulberry silk, nettle from Nepal. Our hand-knotted carpets are never tufted, and they are never finished in factories.

We are an atelier, not a brand. We do not decide a season's collection and then find weavers to fill it. The piece a client commissions decides how long it takes and who weaves it.

Hand-knotting in progress on a vertical loom; every TVR carpet is made this way.

Production: where, and why

Our hand-knotted carpets come from four regions, each chosen for what it does best.

  • Nepal: Tibetan-style weaving on vertical looms. Most of our modern designs are knotted here. Nepal is also the only source of our nettle fibre: taken from the inside of the stem of a local plant, boiled in tea water, hand-spun. It produces a natural shading no dye can replicate. We now ship Nepalese nettle to our atelier in India as well.
  • India, Rajasthan: where the finest pieces in our range are knotted. The wool is hand-spun and hand-carded, with a softness machine-spun yarn cannot match, and the highest knot counts we produce are possible here.
  • Kashmir: for carpets in the legendary Kashmir wool. Fine, lustrous, prized for centuries.
  • Pakistan and Afghanistan: for our carpets in Afghan Ghazni wool, with the natural shading the Persian tradition calls abrash (subtle variations of the same hue within a single piece, prized for the character they bring). The weaving is done on looms in Afghanistan; the finishing happens in Pakistan.

The geography moves with the design. The standard does not.

A Few World's Firsts

In the years since I founded the atelier, we have been first in the industry on a number of things. Each came out of a client's question or a designer's brief, never out of a marketing plan.

  • 2012: First to weave a hand-knotted carpet from a real-life photograph: Ceci n'est pas LANY, a portrait of the Belgian DJ Maxim Lany.
  • 2013: First to engineer a hand-knotted carpet for outdoor use, woven in water-resistant fibres that hold up to rain, sun and frost.
  • 2014: First to add a holographic authenticity label with a hidden message to every rug we make, so a TVR can always be proven a TVR.
  • 2014: First to produce a hand-knotted Stereogram limited-edition rug: a flat surface with a hidden three-dimensional image.
  • 2015: First to weave a carpet with more than 250 colour switches per weaving line, in a series with the Belgian artist Koen Soberon. A single piece took a full year on the loom.
  • 2016: First to design a carpet from satellite imagery, with the architects Brown Davis, exhibited in Miami.
  • 2016: First to give every client a live production feed: automated photo updates as their rug grows on the loom.
  • 2017: First to film our production in Virtual Reality, so collectors can walk the loom floor inside our showroom in Belgium.
  • 2018: First luxury hand-knotted brand to ship a branded maintenance set free with every commission: The WonderCase.
  • 2018: First in the world to weave a hand-knotted rug with real 18-carat gold fibre, using a blending technique with wool and silk that we developed in-house.

A full year-by-year timeline lives on our innovation page.

Recognition

The "Spaces" collection won two awards in 2020: the European Product Design Award, and Popular Choice at the Architizer A+ Awards. The Carpet Design Awards in Hannover have recognised our work four times: Ceci n'est pas LANY and our weather-resistant outdoor carpet, both Best Innovation finalists in 2013, the LEGENDS 2013 collection, second place for Best Collection Transitional that same year, and our stereogram carpet, a Best Innovation finalist in 2014. Most recently, our LEGENDS: Tenby received a 2026 Architizer A+Product Awards Special Mention in the Carpet & Flooring category.

We are glad of the recognition. It is not what we are judged on twenty years later.

Spaces collection, winner of the European Product Design Award (2020) and Popular Choice at the Architizer A+ Awards (2020).

The Clients We Serve

Our carpets enter the homes of private collectors across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. They are specified by interior designers and architects for private residences, super-yachts, private aircraft, and hotels whose names we are not at liberty to share. Each of them receives the same hand-knotted carpet, made to the same standard.

Confidentiality is part of the work.

Ethics

We are members of Care & Fair, the European carpet trade's industry initiative against child labour. The weavers we work with (many of them in families that have been knotting for generations) are paid fairly and work in conditions we have visited and verified.

What Has Not Changed

Fifty years on, my father still talks about carpets at the dinner table. I am still travelling. Every knot is still tied by hand. No machine has ever replaced that, and we will not let it. A piece still takes the same number of months it took half a century ago.

That is the point.

Thibault Van Renne, Founder