There’s a particular sidewalk outside my San Francisco apartment — one that turns dark and saturated after it rains. The surface holds color in a way that feels both accidental and intentional, incidental, the score lines cutting through it like a quiet system trying to organize everything the city doesn’t. This collection started there: on monolithic wet pavement, in the in-between spaces that usually disappear into the background of a day.

Nomadory and I began talking about what it meant to design a rug that didn’t behave like a graphic. Something that carried the weight of a place without illustrating it. Something carved, something tonal, something that felt as though it was already lived in — even before it reached someone’s space. Our collaboration settled into a rhythm: materials, edges, steepness, the way light catches a hand-cut line, the feeling of stepping into architecture rather than onto décor.

The stepped border comes from ancient masonry forms — Indian stepwells, the severe stairs at Mitla — where the geometry isn’t ornamental. It shapes how a body moves. It tells you to slow down, to bow, to adjust your posture. That same instinct lives in San Francisco too, in the unexpected little stair runs embedded into sidewalks on steep hills. Those subtle civic gestures — half infrastructure, half choreography — became part of the mental sketchbook for this project.

Inside that border, the surface shifts. The color lives in deep, saturated undertones — wet cement, fog-shadowed gray, the kind of in-between blues and greens that are nameless yet everywhere. The carved lines nod to the control joints in pavement, those humble little decisions that attempt to keep a surface from cracking. A simple act of maintenance that becomes, incidentally, a design language.

Right-of-Way sits inside my studio practice as a continuation of what I’ve been building for years: work grounded in hospitality, material intelligence, and an almost obsessive attention to lived experience. But it also belongs here, at Storefront, which has been my space for collaboration and cultural exchange — a place where architecture meets curation, where experimental objects can be encountered in person, held, felt, lived with for a moment.

This rug exists because the market has drifted toward speed and digital sheen, toward a reality where images substitute for experiences. Right-of-Way is a counterpoint. It asks to be felt. Its language is tactile. It resists trend cycles by being rooted in the ground beneath our feet — in water, slope, cement, memory, and the small rituals of moving through a city.