Savonnerie rugs

The Savonnerie is a royal rug. Strange that this most luxurious of all carpets should take its name from an abandoned soap factory.

The word "savon" means soap, and the early Savonneries were woven in an old building in one of the suburbs of Paris that had been used to make this lowly household article.

Like Aubus­son, Savonnerie has become the accepted name for all the hand-knotted carpets of France, though they have been and are now made in several places. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a young man named Pierre Dupont claimed he had "invented" pile carpet.

Whether or not he got his ideas from Oriental fabrics, he did develop a loom and tools which so interested King Henry IV that he set him up in the palace of the Louvre.

There Dupont did so well that larger quarters were needed and the old soap factory was taken over about 1625.