AVAILABLE NOW
Every price here was set by the group that made the piece. Nobody marks it up in between.
A single-knot pile rug on a natural wool ground, with motifs in dyed wool or sometimes cotton laid over it. Thinner than a Beni Ourain and much more pictorial: figures, animals, ladders, fields of dashes.
The drawing is done without a cartoon. The weaver holds the composition in her head as the rug grows, which is why the two halves of an Azilal rarely mirror each other and why the good ones feel alive rather than laid out.
Both are Middle and High Atlas pile rugs on undyed grounds, and they get conflated constantly by sellers who know one term ranks better than the other.
The practical difference: a Beni Ourain is thicker, sparser and usually monochrome; an Azilal is finer, thinner and carries colour. If it has a deep cream pile and a dark lattice, it is the former. If it has drawings in colour on a flatter ground, it is the latter.
Area first, then knot density, then the wool itself. A finely knotted Azilal takes considerably longer per square metre than a coarse one, and that time is the bulk of what you are paying for.
WHO WEAVES THIS
Different cooperatives hold the same tradition differently — in how tightly they knot it, which wool they use, and what they charge. These are some of the groups weaving this work now.
NOT QUITE RIGHT?
Every piece here can be commissioned from the same cooperative that wove the original, in the dimensions you need, with the yarn dyed to order in Fes.
