The wrong question
“Which is better, silk or wool?” is the wrong question, because neither is universally better. They solve different problems. Wool is the durable, forgiving workhorse fibre; silk is the luminous, high-resolution specialist. Asking which is better is like asking whether a hardwood floor is better than a marble one — it depends entirely on the room and how it will be used.
Wool: what it does well
Wool is the right answer far more often than not. It is durable and resilient, and its natural lanolin content makes it resist soiling and spring back from compression — it forgives traffic in a way no other rug fibre does. It can be professionally washed and structurally restored repeatedly over its life, and good wool holds its colour over decades without any UV treatment. A wool rug is the fibre you put in a room that gets lived in.
Silk: what it does well
Silk does things wool cannot. Its light response and depth of colour are unmatched — the same dye reads richer and more dimensional in silk. Because the filament is so fine, silk takes very high KPSI, which means pattern resolution and detail that wool simply cannot hold. And silk has a directional sheen: the pile catches light differently depending on the angle you view it from, so the rug appears to shift tone as you move around it. That is a property you buy silk specifically to get.
Wool-silk blend: the practical choice
For most principal rooms, the blend is the smartest specification: a wool structure for durability with silk highlights worked into specific motifs to catch the light. You get wool’s resilience and silk’s luminosity without the fragility of a full-silk pile. This is exactly how our Signature and Maison tiers are built — fine wool with optional or detailed silk content.