Narrative Threads Blog
Scroll through our Narrative Threads blog to enjoy behind-the-scenes insight on special projects for leading interior designers and architects.
Scroll through our Narrative Threads blog to enjoy behind-the-scenes insight on special projects for leading interior designers and architects.
Creative Matters was thrilled to participate in COVER Connect New York for the fourth consecutive year. Hosted by COVER magazine, this boutique trade show presents a curated selection of handmade floor coverings from global rug brands. This year, we enriched our collections with a stunning array of meticulously crafted designs and sophisticated new colourways, expanding the Vista, Vanguard, Arcadian and Macrame collections.
We were delighted when Arcadis IBI Group asked us to collaborate with them again, this time on three shaped rugs for the new Azura condo building in Toronto. Their Associate Director Heidi Rose provided us with the specific shapes that they had designed to enhance the interior architecture.
Shaped rugs steal the spotlight, they’re a conversation piece on the floor and they make spaces exciting. Over 35 years we’ve designed a lot of rugs in abstract shapes so we’d thought we’d have a little retrospective. We chose five rugs designed in recent times and five rugs from our 90s archive. From the elegant to the eclectic to the practical, scroll down and enjoy them.
In 2018 Project Manager and Senior Designer Sandra Ciganic-McKinney gave a Creative Matters presentation to the Seattle office of Gensler. One of Gensler’s clients is T-Mobile, and in 2019 they asked us to start work on the first of what would become a whole range of floorcoverings for their Headquarters Campus in Bellevue, Washington.
January is usually a busy month for trade shows for those of us who create handknotted rugs with the Domotex show in Germany and Maison+Objet in France. This year however, we participated in our first virtual trade show - an innovative event organized by COVER, the world’s leading magazine for handmade carpets and textiles for interiors.
When our President Carol Sebert met Matthew Rowe from Campaign for Wool - Canada at the opening of our new showroom in September 2019, little did we know that a year later we would be launching a capsule collection of rugs made from 100% Canadian wool.
Private equity firm Great Hill Partners looked to Gensler Boston to create a workplace that distinctly reflects their culture. Gensler designed a welcoming environment that pairs a dramatic palette with statement features and asked us create a series of six rugs in four complementary designs for the locations most visible to clients.
Rug designer may not sound like a career path that involves a wide variety of international travel but at Creative Matters it surely does. As in many jobs there are trade shows to attend, but what really racks up the passport stamps are the trips we make to supervise production of our rugs.
Late 2018 Cheryl Krismer of Crayon Design came to us with two detailed hand-drawn sketches for two flights of a spiral staircase in a spacious contemporary Toronto residence. We then worked together to turn her exquisite sketches on small pieces of tracing paper into fully developed designs for each runner.
When Kimpton opened its first boutique hotel in Toronto last month, its many interior treasures included 21 delightfully artisanal rugs by Creative Matters.
Remarkably talented artisans handcraft our artistic floor covering designs. They are masters in traditional weaving methods, turning our designs into beautifully crafted rugs and carpets. In December 2023, Managing Partner Ali McMurter and Creative Director Sandra Ciganic-McKinney explored our mill in Nepal. In January 2024, Director of Design Development Anna Panosyan and Logistics Specialist Suhindhar Raveendiran Santhi ventured to our mill in India.
Introducing the latest addition to Creative Matters' Macrame rug collection: the Chalet rug. The never-before-seen rug is set to make its debut at COVER Connect New York, the boutique trade show, held in central Manhattan, bringing together leading high-end rug designers, buyers and retailers from around the world.
As the demand for Creative Matters’ carpets continues to increase so must our design team grow bigger. This year we have 13 designers not including our three Partners (Ali, Ana and Carol) who still love to fit in some design among their other responsibilities. We asked each designer to select their favourite 2022 carpet and they came up with 12 different answers, testament to the diversity of our creations.
Art Day - when our whole team takes time away from regular work to indulge in pure creation on a particular theme - is at the heart of the design culture of Creative Matters. Imagine everyone’s delight this month when Senior Designer Sandra Ciganic-McKinney announced that she had booked four Tibetan rug weavers complete with mini-looms to join us for our next Art Day.
Following on the success of our two previous look books, we’re excited to announce that Inspired 3 is now available in hard copy (request one here) or for online viewing. Unlike the brochures for our collection rugs, each of our look books contains almost 200 images of original designs that can be used as a jumping off point for custom rug or wallcovering creations.
Do you feel like exploring the most intriguing pieces that shaped Creative Matters in 2017? Then look no further than this list of some of our designers' favourites which run the gamut from a 36-foot (11-metre) residential runner to a wall hanging for an airport to a corporate rug sprayed with mustard yellow.
While most of our studio work consists of handknotted, handtufted or machine made floorcoverings, Senior Designer Sandra Ciganic-McKinney has been heading up a project developing a new type of area rug that is essentially a handtufted, zero pile rug with a screen printed field.
When New York-based Janson Goldstein needed a custom wallcovering for their boutique client The Westside this summer, they knew who to ask as we worked together last year on floor and wallcoverings for Canadian luxury retailer Holt Renfrew. For the wallcovering, our direction was a design that had both a California beach vibe and a modern finish to reflect the luxury goods on offer.
Creative Matters will proudly launch two new versatile rug collections at The Rug Show in New York (September 10 - 13). Arashi and Architexture, like all our collections, are made of wool and silk in Nepal using the timeless technique of handknotting.
Following the incredible success of our first look book, we are delighted to announce the arrival of our second, inspired 2. Unlike our collection books that feature floorcoverings that have been fully-designed and produced as handknotted rugs, our look books present a large collection of carpet and wallcovering designs at a much earlier stage in their development.