Partnership info
Overview
- Type
- Product Collaboration
- Year
- 2025
Surreal Shifts marks Wearstler's ninth collaboration with The Rug Company, and it leans into something she's built an entire career doing: blending past with present until the seam disappears. Four rugs make up the set, each built from the same tension: bold, graphic motifs set against something softer and more painterly, a considered color palette, textures sumptuous enough to remind you a rug is meant to be felt as much as looked at. Each design—Cascadia, District, Wavelength, Avant Graphite—carries its own two-colorway split, and the palette follows the same tension as the patterns themselves: one colorway leans cool and considered, the other warmer and more textural. Silk and wool do most of the talking, with the occasional metallic thread catching light differently depending on the motif. It's the same instinct as pairing old with new, just carried in color instead of form.
Creative Process
Surreal Shifts asked for something no single technique could cover. Four different references pulling in four different directions meant the weavers in Nepal couldn't lean on one method to get all of them right. What followed was a genuine back-and-forth, conducted block by block and knot by knot, each side translating for the other until every reference actually held up as a rug rather than just an idea. By the end, the range itself became the point: proof that The Rug Company's craft could stretch across four completely different registers without losing its own hand.
Creative Direction
The collection was shot at the Sowden House, Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival landmark tucked into the hills of Los Feliz. Its concrete geometry doesn't apologize - it's severe, symmetrical, borrowed in spirit from ancient pyramids and reassembled for 1926 Hollywood. That's the exact collision Surreal Shifts runs on: something centuries old standing shoulder to shoulder with something unmistakably current. Cascadia's brushstroke mountains and District's fractured geometry both found room to breathe against those concrete walls, each rug picking up a conversation the house has been having with itself for a century: old bones, new attitude.
I've always been drawn to putting something historical next to something completely current and letting the two figure out how to coexist. This collection is that instinct, stated four different ways.
