The house
In 1721 Parliament
made this illegal
Printed cotton was banned in English homes for fifty-four years to protect the wool trade. Women bought it anyway.
The Act said so in its own title
The Calico Act of 1721 prohibited the use and wear of all printed, painted, stained or dyed callicoes in apparel, household stuff, furniture, or otherwise. Household stuff and furniture: bedding, hangings, floor covering. Precisely the things this shop sells.
It was not a squeamish piece of law. In 1719 weavers rioted in London and threw acid at women wearing printed cotton in the street. Parliament sided with the weavers. Smuggling became ordinary and a pamphleteer of the day complained about what he called the present frenzy of our womenkind.
The women kept buying it. The ban stood until 1774, when Parliament gave up.
English women wanted this cloth so badly that the government outlawed it and mobs attacked them for it, and they bought it anyway. That is not a marketing line. It is fifty-four years of statute.
What we actually sell
Two things, and they earn their price differently.
Carpets — the design without the century
Every carpet we make is a central medallion with quarter medallions in the corners and pendants above and below. That arrangement was settled in the court workshops of the 1500s and has not meaningfully changed since. A period carpet in that layout sits behind a rope in a Pimlico dealer’s shop at five thousand pounds.
We are not selling you a fake antique. We are selling the design, woven this year, in the size your room actually is. That is the honest position and it happens also to be the strong one: it kills the price objection without ever requiring us to claim an age, a knot count, or a hand we do not have.
Cloth — the banned thing itself
Block-printed cotton is literally what the Calico Acts named. Carved wooden blocks, pressed into cotton by hand, one impression at a time, in the same district. No stretching required; the lineage is direct and it is documented.
Who makes them
The Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh, in central India. Our warehouse is there. It is a family business and it sits in the same district as the looms, which is the only reason any of this works at the price it does.
When you order, the work goes to a weaving household who are paid for that carpet. There is no agent standing between them and us, and no importer, showroom or Mayfair shop standing between us and you. The century of merchants that used to sit in the middle of this trade is the century we have removed.
We are careful about what we claim here, because this is exactly the sort of sentence brands invent. So, plainly: we do not operate the looms ourselves and we do not own them. We buy from workshops we can drive to, we pay on delivery of each piece, and we will tell you which district anything came from if you ask.
What we will not do
- Claim an age. Your carpet was woven this season and we say so on every page.
- Claim a fibre we have not verified. Suppliers write “woollen” on things that are not wool. We print the composition we have confirmed, and nothing else.
- Write reviews we did not receive. Fake reviews are unlawful in the United Kingdom and they are also the fastest way to lose a customer with any judgement. Where we have none, the page says we have none.
- Invent a countdown. The only deadline on this site is the day the consignment physically seals in Malwa, and the only limit is the number of looms we release each Monday. Both are real and both are written down.
The name
Saracen was the word medieval Europe used for the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, and Saracenic is still the word for the ornament that came with them into English architecture and design. It is an English word for an Eastern thing, which is exactly what this house is: an English shop with extraordinary stock.