A Return to Natural Luxury
Eden Studio crafts bespoke rugs and carpets in New Zealand, working with natural fibres to create pieces designed entirely around a client’s space, palette and vision.
Based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and operating from its own purpose-built manufacturing facility, Eden Studio is a design-led textile practice producing bespoke rugs and carpets for residential and commercial interiors across Australasia and the United States. The studio is the evolution of Carpets and Rugs of New Zealand, which has been making rugs from New Zealand wool for nearly 24 years.
At the centre of its offering is in-house tufting technology, custom-built to produce textures, patterns and dimensional finishes that sit beyond what is commercially available.
When co-director Anna Ormrod and her partner acquired the business in 2025, the rebrand reflected a shift from production-focused workshop to design-led studio, one shaped by close partnerships with renowned architects, stylists and interior designers across the region.
At the centre of its offering is in-house tufting technology, custom-built to produce textures, patterns and dimensional finishes that sit beyond what is commercially available. The studio tufts at a slightly longer pile height to deliver a softness underfoot that further sets its work apart. Fibres span New Zealand merino wool, mulberry silk, mohair, alpaca, linen and nylon, though wool remains the hero material, accounting for around 70 per cent of production. It is a material, Ormrod notes, that is frequently misunderstood. “Wool is not the enemy,” she explains. “It is hardwearing, easy to clean and better for the environment, and it takes up dye colours much more readily than other fibres.”
The design process opens with a conversation. A client or designer arrives with a starting point – whether a colour direction, a mood, photograph or a dimension – and the studio draws it up digitally, developing between 10 and 25 concept variations. A sample may be produced for physical approval before full production begins, and most pieces are ready within eight to 12 weeks.
What that process can produce goes well beyond a rug that fits a room. The studio will match colours to the exact shade of a client’s curtains, pick up a vein running through a marble surface, curve a piece to follow the arc of a furniture leg or cut to the millimetre for a specific placement. A recent project with Wellington-based designer Natalie Bradburn saw a custom carpet laid across an entire townhouse, its colour informing the direction of every room.
For a client in Wānaka, Ormrod and her team visited the construction site before the build was complete, and the landscape views through the windows became the foundation of the design. “Every client conversation genuinely produces a different outcome,” she says, “even if you start at the same vague concept.”
Lately, that concept increasingly involves colour, think deep yellows, cedar greens, soft blues. Clients are drawing from their immediate environments – from a building style seen through a library window to a favourite beach – to create designs that Eden Studio renders in wool. The shift speaks to something broader: a return to the personal, the considered and the irreplaceable. That is, ultimately, what Eden Studio builds towards: not just a rug, but a relationship between a person and their space.
