Pads and underlinings are so important for Oriental Rugs. A fine vintage rug on a polished floor without pad can unfortunately be like the classic banana peel slip in cartoons. You need to be safe, you need to protect your rug.  But are all rug pads created equal?

We've been around the block when it comes to rug related products, especially rug pads. Many years ago underlinings were simple - often made of horse hair like a rolled out pelt. Today there's almost every product under the sun you could imagine. Thin pads, thick pads, rubber pads, felt pads, pads made from recycled plastic, non-skid, combination non-skid and pad, rug-to-rug sticky felt pad, carpet to floor, carpet to ceiling...  Not really the last one, but getting there.

We're super happy to introduce our new eco friendly and greener rug pad. It's literally made from natural rubber and jute.

That means no plastics, no petroleum based rubber. Our eco-friendly pad is suitable for most rug to floor applications: meaning low profile for clearance under doors, some cushion, great for carpet to hard surfaces such as hardwood or marble tile or vinyl, etc. It comes with a ten year guarantee to retain grip, it's affordable, it's a more green friendly solution.

What are you waiting for?  We found the perfect green eco-friendly rug pad for you and it's sitting in our shop! 

We love rugs.  There is always at least one or two spots for a special antique or vintage rug in your room: and it does not always have to be on the floor.  A rug can be displayed on the wall, atop the ottoman, slung over the side of a couch.  So with all these different ways of decorating with rugs, lets talk about what we consider rugs:  Technically a rug is an area rug measuring approximately 5'x8' and smaller in size.  The word 'rug' and 'carpet' are for the most part used interchangeably.  In the Old New House shop, our featured rugs are exclusively hand knotted or hand woven - which is the more intimate of many types of processes in making rugs*.  This is one important aspect of what we provide to the customers: Authenticity and genuine hand made rugs.  So while one part of authenticity is hand made nature, another important factor is true age.

So how do we date our rugs?

In the Old New House shop, an antique rug is one we place an estimated age of 100 old or greater.  This is somewhat of a conservative approach to calling a rug antique (some say 60 or 80 years).  Why do we not call an 60 or 80 year old rug antique?  Many years ago, old customs import/export laws would only consider a rug to be antique if it exceeded 100 years old.  Many museums and collectors still consider this to be true.  In the ONH shop, if you see us calling a rug an antique, it's more or less pre-1915.  Here are a few of our antique rugs:

An antique Mohtashem Kashan rug

An antique Belouch rug

An antique Kerman rug

What is a vintage rug?  We consider a vintage rug to be one with a weaving date of +/- 40 to 99 +/- years old. Due to a high level of commercialization in the rug industry, we select the best of the best vintage rugs to offer in our shop - great quality wool and weave, awesome contrast or tone on tone. Here are a few examples of Old New House vintage rugs:

A gorgeous vintage Sarouk runner

A hard-to-find size rug - a happy vintage Hamadan

A vintage Kerman rug

*  Loose paraphrasing of industry wording - an Oriental rug is a hand made weaving created with or without pile comprised of a warp and weft made in the Near, Mid or Far East. Technically, this includes many types of rugs - Kilim rugs, hand knotted rugs, soumak rugs, even hand tufted rugs.  The rugs we feature in the shop are exclusively hand made, and most all of the rugs are hand knotted. While qualities in all types of rugs may vary, the process of hand knotting rugs is considered among the more intimate of processes to create a floor covering.

Melissa + Dave

Old New House

Any time of year is the right time of year for brilliant botanical paintings in watercolor.  In the springtime they're an indoor celebration of growth and renewal, in the summer they emulate the beauty outdoors in full bloom.  In fall and winter, a gentle reminder of the cycle of life while things wind down.  It is said one of the greatest carpets of all time (yes, another Old New House specialty aside from Wall Art includes antique area rugs!), The Spring of Khosrow Carpet, as it was known, was created for King Khosrow's as he longed greatly for his well manicured gardens during the cold winter months in Persia.  We hope you too find this section of our shop to be warming, inviting and of course inspirational!  Be sure to take a look at our new arrivals where many of these watercolors can be found, as well as our botanical section and of course, Old New House antique carpets.

No watering required!

Old New House

There's nothing quite like having a piece of real history on your wall.  Antique pull down maps are one of those wall art pieces that are stand alone + amazing. 

Maybe it's the golden patina, perhaps its the crackling texture, maybe it's the subject matter - Europe, North America, or an antique pulldown World map...  At the end of the day, we think it's a combination of all these things + the story:

Often used as educational guides in schools, libraries and public institutions. These maps and charts were pulled on, rolled (at times slapped up too quickly) - sometimes several times a day.  What an amazing thrill it was to have a break from the squeaky chalk board and have one of these maps rolled out in front of a classroom.  Perhaps these are the very maps of yesterday that inspired the likes of future politicians, dignitaries, architects, teachers and more.  Perhaps geography wasn't everyone's strength in school, but I think we all had a secret thrill from seeing something different during the school day - especially the ever-so-welcome colorful outlines of these relics.  It's amazing to see these in the condition they are - some of the antique pull down maps we offer are 50, 75, 100 years old.  A few are even pre-Civil War! 

As a testament to this beautiful and mysterious world and the education process where today's learning aides and classroom tools seem to be ever so easily replaced with digital, we hope you too can find inspiration from these maps and charts.

M+D

Old New House

Brand new to trade shows and expos of any kind, for those of you who don't know: we braved the sea of vintage this year at The Manhattan Vintage Show. It was quite the experience to say the least with our biggest expectations and hopes being to connect with a lot of new people outside of the world of the internet and to hopefully convert some of them to be ONH fans! We are a bit shy by nature so it was a big deal for us to go into the city, create a space from the ground up that represented our online shop, and to put ourselves out there: "here we are and hope you like it!". It was exciting and of course a bit scary but after the two days of working harder than we could have possibly imagined, we made it back to a rented apartment just in time to rock our baby to sleep and we thought to ourselves: wow, we did it, we actually pulled it off.

To say that the show went off without a hitch would be an outright lie. Getting down to the city from our humble abode in Westchester with an eleven month old baby who just doesn't do car-rides as well as a cargo van chock full of our most prized inventory was no easy task and came with some challenges (who knew you couldn't take a van on the highway? maybe you did?). Then of course we had to navigate parking for two vehicles. One that contained the baby and all of the stuff that comes with the baby when you do a weekend trip. Crazy amounts of stuff is all I can say! Next we had to shlep all of our belongings all while carrying our son and then the next morning (the day of the show) start the shlepping process all over again, to bring our inventory into the booth. Then came set up, then came fixing up, then came second guessing ourselves, then came food somewhere in there, and of course then came figuring out who would be with the baby since the babysitter was having trouble with city parking (who doesn't??), and then at some point after a lot a lot of coffee, came the beginning of the show. After that point, everything was just plain awesome. Our expectations of meeting and connecting with new people was absolutely exceeded by a million because the people we chatted with for lengthy amounts of time were just so amazing, it felt like a shame that we hadn't met them sooner.

The Vintage Show was mainly all about clothing but it was also about textiles (in come our rugs). We feared that perhaps we wouldn't fit in because our clothing collection was small (and not yet out there in the world, merely a hobby curated collection) but we had the opposite experience. While people were indeed interested in our small clothing selection, so many of them were interested in our rugs and home decor as well just as we had hoped! Not only did we connect with people about the rugs they needed for their homes, but we learned a lot too -- about clothing and about what everyone out there is looking for which was absolutely invaluable for us.

While it was a tremendous amount of hard labor and pushing ourselves beyond the depths past our pre-existing (baby-related) exhaustion, the show was overall such a great success and we enjoyed every minute of the experience! Until we do another one of these or have our first real pop-up shop (which we are getting serious about planning!), this was the last time we would see our customers + new contacts in person for awhile, so we were so thankful to have it!

**Such a huge thank you to Natalie Conn for the beautiful photographs, & Hilary and Lina for the tremendous amount of help throughout the show!