The second coming of the shag-pile carpet

It started with a shag. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla opens with a close-up shot of bare feet sinking softly, silently, into a long-haired carpet as luxuriant as a summer lawn. The King’s 1960s Graceland is awash with buttery carpeting. Together with the swagged curtains and kitsch figurines, the film’s floor coverings, conceived by production designer Tamara Deverell, are as much of a signifier of the consumerism of midcentury America as Priscilla Presley’s fake lashes and beehive. 

“Wall-to-wall carpeting was a big part of Graceland at that time,” says Deverell. “We pushed the idea further by choosing extremely plush carpets that Priscilla could sink her toes into. The carpets were essential to creating the interior’s texture and the wedding-cake feel.” 

The carpets are so all-encompassing that they threaten to smother Elvis’s beloved “little one” almost entirely. Yet these same enveloping qualities are sparking its current decorative revival in the design world.

You either love it or hate it. There is no middle ground

Whether cut-pile, patterned or full-blown shag, wall-to-wall carpet is making a comeback. At Tom Ford, under the new creative direction of Peter Hawkings, acres of creamy shag carpet introduced his debut in an SS24 show that paid tribute to revolutionary midcentury supermodel Donyale Luna. For Loewe’s SS24 pre-collection, Jonathan Anderson dressed models in shaggy stilettos, dubbed the “toy rug pump”, whose exaggerated woollen loops resemble sheep (as though the shag had simply stuck to their shoes). 

Much like colour, how you feel about fitted carpets is subjective and driven by cultural, generational and often deeply embedded psychological forces. “I’m obsessed with fully carpeted rooms,” says Billy Cotton, the American designer behind the creative, often flamboyant interiors of artists including Cindy Sherman and Lisa Yuskavage. “It’s a love affair that operates on a very visceral level.” Tellingly, there was not a single carpeted room in the designer’s old, cold childhood home in New England. For him, carpets conjure fancy French hotels. For others, however, carpet is connected to suburbia. “Clients either love it or hate it,” he says. “There is no middle ground.”

Cotton treats carpeting in the same way he would any other interior texture. He installed Pierre Frey’s Caisson Bouquet, a cut-pile in a floral 19th-century pattern, in the bedroom and – much to the fury of social media – the bathroom of Lily Allen and David Harbour’s Brooklyn brownstone home. “Nothing is more cocooning,” says Cotton, who’s covering an entire interior – floor, walls, ceiling – in a deep-sea-navy carpet for a home cinema that nods to the flooring of English picture houses.

Patterned and deep-pile carpets have long been a signature for Milan’s Dimorestudio. The design duo – comprising Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci – celebrated their 20th anniversary with a series of decorative interiors, each with its own custom carpet, recently released by Pierre Frey. “Wall-to-wall carpeting is not such an Italian thing,” says Salci, who associates fitted carpets with the dynamic designers of the 1960s and 1970s including Gae Aulenti and Piero Manzoni: his designs for this season draw too from the slightly faded floors you’d find in old American motels. “Carpets can warm up the atmosphere and balance out the coldness of modern metal or steel furnishings. It gives an immediate club atmosphere,” he says. In his mind, a carpet can conjure Nonna’s home as much as the 1960s Milanese night spot Nepentha. 

Not that it’s all about maximalism. “Wall-to-wall carpets can do a really good job of growing a space,” says Emma Burns, the joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, Great Britain’s longest- established decorating firm and purveyor of the English-country-house style, which first adopted the innovations of fitted carpets. “They blur the edges of a room and eliminate gaps in a way that rugs can’t.” Burns is a fan of a deep-pile avocado wall-to-wall, which, she says, though strident, is rendered surprisingly neutral en masse – as well as a long-haired, 1970s shag. “Shag carpets can be lovely and cloud-like,” says Burns. “They have the power to cut the formality of things.” 

Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler has recently revived its archival Brussels Weave carpets. At Castle Howard, decorator Remy Renzullo installed its pretty, floral Heartsease pattern in one of the bedrooms. “I feel sick about how much I like this carpet,” posted Alexa Chung on Instagram when she stayed there overnight. 

In the hands of young decorators, carpets are being reanointed. “Fitted carpets don’t have to be old-school,” says English interior designer Benedict Foley, the founder of A Prin Art, which sells frames, brackets and decorative ephemera. “They had a bad time in the 1980s, but I love the 1920s and 1930s era, which are very Duchess of Devonshire and W Somerset Maugham. It’s really all about context.” 

When Foley refurbished the east London home of creative consultant Max Hurd, he adapted a design from The Rug Company into a custom-fitted carpet for a stairwell. “It’s underfoot artwork,” says Foley of the frenetic Harvest style. “The carpet allows an extra register of pattern and colour.” 

Upstairs, he transformed an attic with a cut-price office carpet in amethyst purple. Decorative fortune, he believes, favours the bold. “You can take something inexpensive and have fun with it. Fitted carpets are exciting because they’re an underused area of design. There’s a snobbishness around them that I love to subvert by showing they can be fabulous.” 

There are hazards though. Burns recalls a decadent dinner party when a guest decided to give the host’s loose-pile carpet a trim – and set about shearing the shag with a lawnmower. Don’t try this at home.