Christie Ward and Staver Gray always knew they would release a rug collection.

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Since founding their New York-based firm, Ward + Gray, in 2020, designing thoughtful custom pieces has been core to the brand. One of Christie and Staver’s first projects, Wildflower Farms—the exquisite Hudson Valley resort—became a huge inspiration in what would become the duo’s first rug collection. The hotel features about 450 custom pieces, including a Blue Moon rug inspired by nights spent under a blanket of stars in the Alentejo region of Portugal.

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“Even though Christie and I work in a predominantly hospitality space, our work feels residential,” says Staver from her airy office in SoHo. “That’s always the goal.” An aversion to trends, along with an ever-evolving design sensibility, allows the pair to distill a travel destination’s character into covetable objects.

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Each site-specific project begins with an intense amount of research, often followed by a trip to local antique stores, where the designers hunt for mood-matching treasures. “We love a layered interior,” says Christie, who met Staver as a graduate student at Parsons School of Design, in New York. “Something that looks collected and lived-in—nothing too precious or polished.”

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With this rug collection, their love of travel is on full display, and no region (or season) is off-limits. Winter Rug is a cool-toned riff on vintage Swedish herbarium sheets, while Terracotta by the Sea, originally designed for Christie’s New York apartment, evokes the bracing sensation of dipping your toes into the cool waters of the Mediterranean Sea. We spoke with both designers about their designs and why travel plays such a key role in their creative process.

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Our design philosophy

Staver: Our sensibility is constantly evolving. For starters, it's very project-specific, so we use research as an entry point to any project. We like our designs to feel specific to the place and the architecture... And our projects are so varied.

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Right now, we're working on a new build in Australia and a motel renovation in Montauk. What we love so much about our job is that we're constantly evolving, learning, doing research, and getting excited about different design periods.

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What inspires us

Christie: Both Staver and I love to travel, and every time we do, we take snaps of building facades or tilework... We share a travel log, so whenever we come back from a trip, we sit down and look at what the other person saw. Getting out there and seeing how other people do things has been really influential for us.

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If Ward + Gray were a season, we would be…

Staver: Summer, all the way.

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Christie: I'm someone who works well in the warmth, and I feel like summer has this exciting spirit to it.

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What sets us apart

Staver: All of the colors in our rugs are custom-dyed. If we don't find the right hue, we'll tether two colors together like spun wool. We also do so many strike-offs. Each rug will go through 10 versions before we're happy with it. We're pretty detail-oriented and specific when we have a vision.

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Sometimes it's hard, but we'll go back and forth with the makers. Or we’ll take a specific rug to different mills to see who can achieve the best result. There are different numbers of knots per square inch that influence how detailed a design is. All these specific decisions go into a design before we are ready to release it as part of our collection.

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What we love about making rugs

Christie: It's one of our favorite things to design. It's been fun putting them together by collaging, Photoshopping, or drawing different details together.

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Staver: Rugs have been around for so long and there are so many different techniques. There's flatweave, cut pile, hand-knotted, and shag... We've had fun playing around with different construction styles woven into one rug—which we hadn't seen before—and different shapes beyond the rectangle.

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What we love about our collection

Christie: We honed in on this 100% wool hand-knotted texture that we have distressed to look like an antique. It’s something we were never able to find when we were looking for rugs off the shelf, so we decided to develop it. We tried a lot of different methods to make our rug look old and worn. It excited us to perfect this technique across different patterns to give our rugs that heirloom look.

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What’s next

Christie: We are working on seven hospitality projects at the moment. We have a motel project in Montauk; a member’s club in Jacksonville, Florida; and hotels in Philadelphia, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and Melbourne, Australia.

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Staver: We also have four residential projects wrapping up. The idea is to continue our product assortment with a new rug collection based on the things we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes, and then potentially a lighting line, but that would come next year.

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