Big Brother has landed on our screens in the UK and the house is as amazing as ever! Custom made wallpaper, whirl pools, chill out areas with custom made upholstery and a nest, this place is so cool everyone should envy the big brother house mates.

This house is going to be the last Big Brother house ever in the UK, or so they say, 10 years of the big brother house and UK television audiences have seen some of the most outrageous and crazy interior design as of yet.

It’s colourful and bright with a carnival/ circus theme. And as it’s the last ever series the producers have paid tribute to stars of the show from the last 10 years.
Painted on the bathroom wallpaper and on plates on the kitchen are images of host Davina McCall, 42, interviewing a housemate.
There are also drawings of Orlaith McAllister, 31, and Craig Coates, 26, kissing in the pool for a dare on BB6 as well as BB7 lovebirds Mikey Dalton, 27, and Grace Adams Short, 24.
There are also plenty of pictures of chickens, homage to birds that housemates looked after in the first few series’.

For the first time since the Big Brother phenomenon started,  housemates can see people coming and going from the Diary Room also heading up to the outside world once evicted.

The interior of the house is almost completely perspex, making the house so public that no one can hide, the only place to not include prespex in it, is the toilets. The floors are all custom made for the house, all of which feature intricately designed rugs and carpets. In previous years rug company’s such as Amazed and Woven Ground have been given the responsibility and honour to design for the BB house.

One of the biggest name in rug design and manufacture in the UK is The Rug company. Set up by  Christopher and Suzanne Sharp in 1997 The Rug Company have only but prospered in the rug market. In the beginning the rug market was filled with old rugs descended from old traditional persian rugs. Their mission was to inject originality and design into the rug market and that is exactly what they have down. I’m sure they aren’t the first to do it but they have collaborated with many fashion designers on their rugs. Original versions of Paul Smith’s candy-striped Swirl, Vivienne Westwood’s ineffably British Flag and Marni’s brilliantly bold Margherita are becoming increasingly collectable. “Hopefully, people will look back on this period and see that it was an interesting time for rugs,” says Christopher. All of their rugs are made by Tibetan weavers based in Nepal, each rug is spun, cleaned, dyed and knotted entirely by hand, in ethically sound conditions.

Christopher says: “We set out to do one thing and we have stuck to it. We make great rugs. Not furniture, not tables, not chairs, just rugs.”

The rug has always traditionally sat on the floor but it could also look great as a piece of art on a wall. Many rugs that are mounted on the wall are hand woven tapestries, normally very intricate and have delicate designs woven in. Many tapestries are hung in museums or churches due to their religious and historical natures. A tapestry is woven on a vertical loom. It is composed of two sets of intertwining threads, those running parallel to the length, the warp and those parallel to the width, the weft.

Unlike tapestries that are woven and are usually rather thin due to the use of cotton or silk threads, there are other types of rugs that can be hung onto walls. Amazed Ltd use wool rugs with thick pile for their wall hangings, using this type of rug can bring a contemporary feel into any room. Most of their rugs are indented with interesting patterns and designs, they are also oddly shaped and can be designed and made in many different styles and colours.

Maybe the future of large rugs is not on the floor but on the wall…

Modern rugs can make a room feel homely and comfortable whilst adding taste to a room, much like owning a large rug by Henzel of Sweden. They excel in colour and art but also being practical- Henzel wool is durable and resilient but is also comfortable and safe. Henzel use the purest, cleanest, wool from New Zealand. The Henzel Studio is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their primary aim is to design and manufacture individual pieces of great originality.

http://www.byhenzel.com/catalogue.htm

NEL, an evolving collective of Mexican designers, commissioned this bespoke rug by Spanish rug and carpet company Nanimarquina. The large rug, aptly name Global Warming contrasts the comfort and softness of a bespoke rug with a thorny problem that is specific to our time. Following the age-old tradition of using wool rugs as a means for communication and a cultural record, NEL is portraying global warming in a scene that invites us to reflect on our impact on today’s world.

Washing the Fleece

Sheep almost always live in the open air, and even the more primitive breeds no longer shed their wool at the end of the winter. This means that they get dirty – often VERY dirty – dusty, muddy and sweaty with lots of entangled bits and pieces. It must be such a relief to dash away from the shearer, free of all that weight, smell and heat. Rugs and carpets, however, be they modern or antique, smooth or shaggy, are expected to be pretty or smart colours and to lack that distinctive aroma that shouts ‘sheep!’

To bridge the gap, the first process towards your rug is scouring, which means washing and rinsing the wool to remove most of the impurities, from sweat to bits of twig. In some breeds (the very sweaty ones) this can reduce the weight of the fleece by up to 50%, but the wool usually used for Designerug rugs and carpets loses only about 25 – 30% of weight in this process – so you know that your shaggy rug may have come from a shaggy sheep, but at least it hasn’t come from a very smelly one!

Scouring, in the case of wool, means gently washing in a detergent mixture, then rinsing until it is free of dirt and detergent both. The wool is usually passed through a series of long, narrow tanks on a belt. Each tank is equipped with a set of gently moving paddles to keep the water moving without tangling the wool. The first tank contains the cleaning mixture, which rapidly becomes extremely dirty. After that, it is pressed through rollers to remove as much water as is possible without turning the whole thing into felt. Then the belt moves it along, in and out of rinsing baths, each rinse being followed by a further gentle pressing. By the fifth bath the cleaning materials have been washed out and the wool looks bright and clean, and shows a surprising range of shades, from palest cream to beige. Of course, there are also black sheep, but their wool is separated out before the scouring. The final process is drying and fluffing, which happens as the belt moves through an oven and the wool is dried with jets of very warm air. Now it is ready for the next stage – the spinning.

Spinning the Wool

Blending.  Ideally, all the spun wool will be a standard colour so the dyer will be able to judge quickly how to produce that puce you chose for your designerug pattern. Unfortunately the sheep are not too interested in that part of the job, and their coats vary over a surprising range, according to age, diet and specialized breeding.

The Blender is the man who sorts that problem out, judging by sight which bales of washed wool have to be dumped into the big blending bin (like an enormous mixing bowl, with paddles) to give an even-coloured yarn at the end. In the blending bin the wool is tossed and stirred to mix up all the different bales of wool, but carefully enough to avoid tangling them. This makes sure that there won’t be darker or lighter lengths in the final yarn. At the same time, a special oil is added to the wool to avoid what could be a dangerous build-up of static electricity as thee wool is processed (most of this oil comes off onto the machines themselves, and the rest is removed in the dyeing process). The man who works as a blender has a very dusty job, although the wool has been washed, and a mask is a necessary part of his equipment.

Hand-making carpets is a job for the patient. At a nearby carpet factory resigned-looking women knot different coloured wool onto a base by hand. They produce traditional carpets with intricate designs, gossiping steadily as they work, but it is s-l-o-o-w.

Assia is of a different breed. 4ft 6in high, give or take an inch, make-up exactly right, hair covered correctly, but with a fine line of lace across her forehead, which adds a touch of elegance, and dressed in a neat top and jeans, she exudes competence and energy and is the most experienced carpet maker of the Rug Designer team.

The day we meet she is masking a sample rug, a complicated ‘peacocks feather’ design in cream, outlined in brown and raised against a cream background. The backing has already been printed from the picture received by email from England, with the design and the reference numbers for the colours. It is stretched onto a traditional carpet loom, then a machine that looks like a hand gun is filled with one of the colours, and a patch is filled in. The gun knots the wool almost exactly like the old ‘by hand’ method, but a lot quicker. It looks no more difficult than ‘painting by numbers’, but I suspect that keeping the colours within their boundaries and getting the correct density is more of an art than it seems!

Assia is, as I said, tiny, and petite in everything except personality. She is unmarried at thirty two, so considers herself as beyond being eligible. She lives with her parents and younger sister, and is allowed to go out to work because Abdul Kader, the foreman and general factotum, does a ‘bus run’, collecting all the women from their homes and returning them at the end of the day. Even a power-house like Assia has to fit in with the social order she lives in, though that does not stop her from being enthusiastic about work. She likes all the different patterns, and clearly enjoys trying out different texture ideas.

CUSTOMISED T-SHIRTS, MUGS AND MOUSE MATS ARE SO LAST WEEK.
Why not consider instead a rug made to a design or image of your choosing? That’s the service on offer from Rug Designer, the first company offering an interactive rug design service worldwide.
Rug Designer is the brainchild of Anthony Hilal who has shed loads of expertise in the area having worked in the family business - which manufactures and supplies yarn to the carpet industry - for several years.

“Because we manage the whole process - that’s from sourcing the raw material to making up the rugs - we’re able to offer very competitive prices,” said Anthony.

With rugs from £79 including delivery, they’re fantastically affordable, but it has to be said that the best thing about Made to Measure is the input customers can have in the design of their rug - from the image or motif through to the colours. Let’s face it, we all fancy ourselves as a bit of a designer, don’t we? And it’s great to get the chance to be part of the creative process.

“We can work with swatches of fabric or wallpaper or a photographic image,” Anthony explained. “Just as long as the images sent to us are clear and guite specific - with everything in block colours - we can make up a rug in pretty much any design you like.”

If you don’t want to go to the trouble of designing your own rug they have a selection of ready-designed rugs that are pretty funky too - all the work of in-house designer Harneeta Kooner. Everything from retro patterns to organic or floral motifs, to paint splattered effects and of even a Zebra print.
These designs can be altered according to your whim - if, for example, you want a zebra rug in bright pink and blue instead of black and white. And the great thing is you can play about with your ideas online - on the website - to check how your finished rug will look.

The interactive aspect to the service is pretty unigue and it’s great fun to mess about with patterns and colours, while giving you the confidence that the rug you order will work with the colours and configurations you have chosen. Incidentally if you don’t find the colours you like they offer a Pantone-matching service too.

Meanwhile, future plans include Rug Designer concessions on select furniture retailers’ websites - just like you have concessions in a department store, only these will be online. (Anthony is very interested to hear from anyone who has a suitable site.)

Oh, and all the rugsare 100 percent wool so no scrimping on quality either.
Lovely stuff.