Fieldnotes
Two ways of making a carpet, one mechanical difference between them, and what that difference governs once the floor is down.
Almost every carpet made today is produced one of two ways. The difference between them is not a grading of quality. It is a question of when the pile and the backing become the same object.
A tufting machine works something like a very wide sewing machine. A bar of needles drives yarn through a primary backing that already exists, a hook or looper catches each loop underneath, and the yarn is held there until a secondary backing and an adhesive lock it in place. The fabric comes first. The pile is added to it.
A loom does not add pile to a fabric. It makes the fabric and the pile in the same pass. Warp yarns run the length of the goods, weft shots cross them, and the pile yarn is interlaced into that structure as the cloth forms, then cut or left standing as a loop. Nothing adheres the tuft in position. The tuft is part of the weave, in the same way a knot is part of a rope.
Almost everything a specifier notices later follows from that one difference.
Tufting is a sophisticated technology and the best of it is very good indeed. Newer machines shift yarn in and out of the surface as they run and can carry large repeats and a real range of color. This is not an argument that tufting is a lesser craft. It is an argument about where each method puts the pattern, because a loom puts it in the structure rather than on it.
An Axminster loom inserts each tuft individually, from its own yarn, cut to length as the loom sets it down. Because every tuft is chosen separately there is no structural penalty for changing color from one tuft to the next, which is why Axminster has always been the construction for elaborate, large-repeat, many-colored work. Fieldmark's Axminster patterns run to eight pile colors. Pitch 7 · 10 rows · 0.290″ cut pile · to 13′ wide. Agate carries a repeat of 78.74 by 81.97 inches, which is a repeat you plan a room around rather than one that disappears into it.
A Wire Wilton loom works the other way about. Several frames of colored yarn are carried in the warp for the whole length of the cloth, and an electronic Jacquard lifts whichever frame is wanted to the surface at each point in the design. The colors not currently on the surface are not cut away; they run on through the body of the cloth. What this buys a designer is surface variety: a Wilton can hold cut pile, loop pile and both together in a single field, at different heights across the same piece of goods. Fieldmark runs Wilton at two pitches. Guillo and Hybrid: pitch 9.33 · 9 rows · 0.250″ loop pile. Mackenzie: pitch 8 · 8 rows · 0.125″ loop and 0.163″ cut in one surface.
Karaloc is Fieldmark's own weave and the quietest of the three: a close, almost knitted surface that keeps the textural depth of a Wilton and gives back very little visual noise. Pitch 5 · 8.6 rows · 0.180″ pile · to 12′ wide. Chantilly and Romney are loop; Cheviot combines cut and loop. It is the construction for rooms where the carpet is meant to be the ground rather than the event.
Pitch describes how many ends of yarn sit across the width of the goods. Rows describes how many rows of tufts fall in each inch of its length. Together they are the grid the pattern has to be drawn on, and a finer grid resolves smaller detail: a scrolled leaf at pitch 9.33 holds a curve the same drawing would lose at pitch 5.
It does not follow that finer is better. A coarser grid at a taller pile reads as texture rather than as drawing, which is exactly what some rooms want and exactly why Karaloc exists. The useful question is whether the grid holds the pattern the design actually needs, and whether the pile height suits how the floor will be walked on.
A carpet is cut before it is installed, and every cut is a test of how the goods were made. In a woven carpet the pile is locked by the warp and weft around it, so a cut edge holds its structure while it is handled, seamed or bound. In a tufted carpet that edge depends on the secondary backing and the adhesive. Both are finished properly by a competent installer, and both can be installed badly. But the margin for error is not the same, and it narrows wherever the goods are asked to bend.
Which is why the difference shows earliest on a stair. A nosing folds the carpet through roughly ninety degrees and then invites every person in the building to stand on the fold. A structure that holds its pile mechanically has an easier time of that than one that holds it chemically. The same is true of a landing seam, an inset border, or any detail that puts a cut edge where feet arrive.
New carpet is easy. The question worth asking of a floor specified for a clubhouse or a principal residence is what it looks like in year twelve.
Two things govern that, and only one of them is the loom. The first is how firmly the pile is anchored, which is where weaving is straightforwardly advantaged. The second is the fiber. New Zealand strong wool holds a natural crimp, a spring along the staple that recovers after load, which is why a wool pile lifts back out of a furniture mark and out of a traffic lane. Wool also hides soil rather than displaying it, and it is naturally flame resistant without chemical treatment.
A woven wool carpet is two decisions stacked in the same direction: a structure that will not let the pile go, and a fiber that stands back up. Neither is a substitute for the other.
The honest limit
The difference is not worth the same everywhere. On a broad flat field of a single color, in a room that is walked through twice a day, a good tufted carpet will serve for years and cost less. The case for weaving is strongest where the floor is patterned, where it turns a corner or climbs a stair, and where the building expects to keep it for twenty years rather than seven.
Fieldmark publishes construction, pitch, rows, pile height, face weight, repeat and width for every pattern in the collection, before anyone asks. A floor is a long commitment, and the specification is the part of it a specifier can actually check.