Rugs, none of you needs telling, are nothing new. I guess bits of jute and flax, not to mention animal skins, were gracing the floors of huts when our ancestors were still making arrowheads. But what is extraordinary is how designers are still able to come up with something new.

Take Nani Marquina, one of a growing contingent of Spanish designers that are beginning to make quite an impact on the international design scene. Nani has taken this age-old furnishing accessory and managed to make it seem fresh and even startling. She plays with colours, shapes and textures in ways that I don’t think have been done before and remind one more of a painter than the textile designer that she is.

For most of us, rugs are usually square, round, oval or rectangular. Marquina sees no reason to stick to these conventions and gives us rugs shaped like giant pebbles or pieces that look like cut-out bits of a jigsaw which she calls “Irregulars”. Their owners can choose pieces and colours, so that no single collection of parts will be the same.

One of the designers she has commissioned, Diego Fortunato, has developed a series on a similar theme — modular squares of rugs in earthy mustard, olive and claret which can be zipped together in any configuration — while another of her own designs, Floc, consists of rugs with serrated edges that can be linked to any number of others. More jeu d’esprit is evident in her use of trompe l’oeil — creating designs of crazy paving or street cobbles — not to mention her use of materials, including old rubber tyres.

Marquina probably first made an impact with her Roses, which, with its cut-out felt petals that moved and flowed, created something of a sensation. It’s still available today, and comes in red, brown, ivory, orange and grey. Her Asia design is another exploration of the flower theme, using slightly raised floral shapes to give textural and decorative interest, while her Seagrass uses long shards of felt to imitate a deep field of grass.

These days, though, she doesn’t do all the designing herself and she’s recruited some of the hottest names in the design world – Martí Guixé, Jorge Pensi, Javier Mariscal (who created the mascot for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992), as well as the fashion designer Sybilla and the young, up-and-coming Ana Mir and Emili Padrós and now Tord Boontje — to design for her studio.

Boontje’s Little Field of Flowers has taken the floral theme to even greater lengths – it consists of a dense bed of felt flowers, each standing proud and free and lending intense textural depth to the rugs. They come in a host of colours — deep red, olive green, grey — and are a world away from your average formal, Persian-style imitation number.

Martí Guixé has done some fairly simple graphic rugs — in scarlet with serrated edges — but Ana Mir and Emili Padrós have come up with some extraordinary designs which feature a highly formalised set of cut-outs or slashes, rather like a textile version of a Lucio Fontana painting. As for Mir and Pedrós’ Flying Carpet, this features corners which swerve up into little back-rests where its tired owner can lie back.

Clearly, these are not rugs for everybody. If your idea of a proper rug is a good old silk Qum or a kelim then these will not be for you. Some of them are weirdly beautiful, others are strangely practical and some are simply eccentric. But they are at the cutting-edge of rug design. They can be seen and ordered at the Conran Shop, 55-57 Marylebone High Street, W1; Tangram, 33-37 Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh; Coexistence, 288 Upper Street, N1; and SCP, 135-139 Curtain Road, EC2.

www.nanimarquina.com

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