A shop that only sells what it has stood in front of

Regal Knots opened on Marylebone High Street in 1974. The trade then worked the way it largely still does: carpets passed from a village agent to a regional wholesaler to an exporter, and arrived in London with a country of origin and nothing else. We started flying to the workshops because we wanted to know what we were selling.

That is still the whole of the business. We visit twice a year, buy what is finished, and pay the price the workshop sets. There is no wholesaler between 14 workshops and our floor, which is why every one of the 18 carpets we hold carries a person’s name rather than a region.

What we will not do

We do not sell machine-made or tufted rugs. Not because they are worthless — a good tufted rug is a perfectly reasonable object — but because they are a different trade, sold on price, and mixing the two makes it impossible to be honest about either.

We do not negotiate a weaver down. The number a workshop quotes is the number we pay, and our margin sits on top of it rather than inside it. This makes our catalogue smaller and our prices less flexible than they might be. We think that is the correct trade.

We do not buy from anyone whose conditions we have not seen. That rules out a great deal of cheap stock and some genuinely beautiful pieces we would have liked to sell.

What we will do

• Tell you when a carpet is wrong for your room, including when that means selling you something cheaper or nothing at all.
• Bring three sizes to your house anywhere in Greater London, lay them, and leave without a sale if none of them is right.
• Repair anything bought from us for as long as you own it, and wash it at cost. The workshop that wove a piece can restore it invisibly, and we know which workshop that is.
• Take it back within thirty days if you change your mind, and collect it ourselves.

The people

There are six of us. Two travel and buy, three are in the showroom, and one spends most of the year repairing things. Between us we have rather less experience than the weavers we buy from, who between them have 436 years at the loom.

Come in

The showroom is at 112 Marylebone High Street. You do not need an appointment and there is no pressure to buy — a good half of the people who come in are looking at carpets the way one looks at paintings, which we think is the right way to look at them. Opening hours and directions.