Our Materials
The wool that made it famous.
Choose Wool Blend or 100% New Zealand Wool — fibre prized for resilience, natural sheen, and dimensional detail.
Why it matters
Carved relief only works if the fibre can hold a shape. Most wall textiles are printed on cotton or bulked out with cheap acrylic — both go flat within a year. We build on New Zealand wool instead, and offer it in two compositions so you can match the piece to the room it has to live in. Designed in the USA; hand-tufted and finished by our maker partners in China.
The fibre
Long-staple, carpet-grade, and unusually white.
New Zealand's climate — cool, wet, temperate year-round — grows a longer, coarser staple than fine-wool regions do. That length is what lets a tufted loop stand upright instead of slumping, and it is why carpet mills the world over specify New Zealand wool for floors that have to survive decades.
It also arrives whiter than almost any other wool, with very little natural yellow. A white ground takes dye cleanly, so an ochre reads as ochre and a deep navy does not go muddy — the colour you approve is the colour that ships.
Properties
What wool does that nothing else does.
It springs back
Wool has a natural crimp that acts like a coil. Press a carved ridge flat and it recovers — which is why a Hewn Earth piece still reads as sculpture after fifteen years on a wall.
It resists fire
Wool is naturally flame-retardant and self-extinguishing, with no chemical treatment. Acrylic melts; wool chars and stops.
It manages moisture
The fibre absorbs up to a third of its weight in humidity without feeling damp, then releases it — so a wool piece quietly steadies the air in a room.
It absorbs sound
Thousands of upright loops trap mid and high frequencies instead of reflecting them. Hang one on a hard plaster wall and the echo drops noticeably.
Sourcing
From a South Island farm to a cone on our wall.
We buy from small growers through a mill that publishes its farm list — no anonymous commodity lots, no blends slipped in at the spinning stage.
Step 01
Shorn
Fleeces come off small South Island flocks once a year, graded on staple length and micron before they leave the shed.
Step 02
Scoured & spun
The wool is washed free of lanolin, combed, and spun into a two-ply carpet yarn heavy enough to survive a tufting gun.
Step 03
Dyed to our palette
Small lots are dyed to our reference colours, wound onto cones, and shelved by hue on the studio wall.
Acoustics
A wall that stops the echo.
Hard rooms ring. Plaster, glass, concrete and bare floors reflect sound straight back, and the result is that faint harshness where conversation feels effortful and a television always seems slightly too loud.
Wool is a porous fibre, and a hand-tufted piece is thousands of individual loops standing proud of a woven backing. Sound waves enter that pile, bounce between fibres, and lose energy as heat instead of returning to the room. The carved high-low relief helps twice over — the varied depth scatters what it does not absorb, so reflections break up rather than come back as a clean echo.
Pile depth on a carved piece — enough thickness to absorb rather than merely dampen.
Where wool works hardest: speech, television and the frequencies that make a room feel harsh.
A single mid-size piece measurably shortens reverb in a small hard-surfaced room.
Colour
Dyed in small lots, matched by eye.
Our dye house works in lots of roughly forty kilos — small enough that a colour can be pulled and re-mixed if it drifts. Every new shade is approved against a physical reference in three lights: morning daylight, lamp light, and the flat grey of an overcast afternoon.
Wool takes acid dye deep into the fibre rather than coating the surface, so the colour does not rub off at the tips as a piece is handled — and it fades far more slowly than a print.
See how a piece is made →
Sculptural relief
Wool with depth you can feel.
After every piece is tufted, we carve it by hand — trimming some areas short, leaving others tall, sculpting the wool into physical relief. What you see on the wall isn't a flat image printed on fabric. It's an object with topography, depth, shadow, and light — different from every angle.
The relief takes another 10–15 hours of hand-work per piece after tufting. Fingers, not machines. It's what makes wool wall art radically different from prints, canvases, or digital art.
Choose your material
Two materials. One craft.
Every design comes in two material compositions. Same New Zealand wool. Same hand-tufting. Two versions to choose from, depending on your home.
80% Wool Blend
80% NZ Wool · 20% Nylon
Our everyday composition. For homes with real energy — family rooms, kids' spaces, high-traffic walls. The blend adds resilience and colorfastness without sacrificing the warmth of wool.
Standard material on every design.Shop all pieces →100% New Zealand Wool
Pure NZ Wool · No blend
Pure fiber, no compromise. For those who want the material in its most honest form. Deeper hand, softens beautifully over years.
Available on every design (+~15%).Shop all pieces →Both materials are offered on every design and every size — you choose your material on the product page.
How to choose
A few questions that usually settle it.
Do you have kids or pets?
80% BlendDirect sunlight most of the day?
80% BlendA statement piece for the anchor wall?
100% WoolA gift meant to be passed down?
100% WoolSomewhere between the two?
80% BlendNot sure? The 80% blend is a great start — most of our customers begin here. Order a swatch in either composition and decide with the wool in your hand.
Responsibility
A material that returns to the ground.
Wool is shorn, not extracted — a sheep grows a new fleece every year. New Zealand growers work to a national code that requires non-mulesed flocks, and our mill sources only from farms operating under it.
At the end of a very long life, a wool piece biodegrades in soil within a few years. An acrylic one does not — it sheds microplastic the whole time it is on your wall, and then it sits in the ground.
The short list
What we don't use.
Acrylic and polyester
Cheaper and easier to tuft, but it goes shiny, flattens under its own weight, and sheds microplastic for its whole life.
Wool-free "wool look"
Yarn sold as wool-look that contains no wool at all. Our 80% composition blends 20% nylon into New Zealand wool for abrasion resistance — a deliberate, disclosed choice, not a substitution.
Printed cotton
What most “wool-look” wall art actually is. It has no relief at all — the shadow you see is printed on.
Chemical flame retardants
Unnecessary. Wool already passes on its own, so nothing is sprayed onto a surface you will touch.
Feel it before you commit
Nothing on a screen tells you what wool feels like.
Order a real 1:1 swatch in your chosen colourway — carved to the same depth as the finished piece. Love it, and the full swatch price comes back as a larger credit on your order.
Browse pieces to swatchQuestions about the wool
How do I care for each material?+
Care for both is largely the same — vacuum monthly on the lowest setting, spot-clean with cool water and mild soap, keep out of direct sunlight. Pure wool pieces benefit from slightly gentler cleaning; avoid harsh chemicals entirely.
Which material am I buying?+
Whichever you select on the product page — 80% New Zealand wool with 20% nylon, or 100% New Zealand wool. Both use the same design, the same hand-tufting and the same woven cotton backing, and every piece ships with a sewn fibre label stating its exact composition.
Is the nylon a compromise?+
No — it is a different job. Nylon is the most abrasion-resistant fibre used in floor and wall textiles, so a fifth of it makes a piece easier to live with in a family room or on a wall in full sun. The pure wool composition trades that resilience for a deeper hand.
Will it shed?+
A new piece releases a small amount of loose fibre for the first few weeks — normal for any hand-tufted wool, and it settles. Long-staple New Zealand wool sheds far less than a short-staple or blended yarn would.
Does it smell?+
Freshly made wool has a faint clean lanolin scent that fades within a week or two of hanging. If a piece ever smells chemical, something is wrong — tell us.
What about moths?+
Wool is a natural fibre, so it is not immune. Vacuum on low every few months and keep the piece out of long-term darkness; both make it an unattractive target.
Is it suitable for a humid room?+
Yes. Wool handles humidity better than almost any fibre. We would still avoid hanging a piece directly above a bath or shower where it takes standing water.
Will it really quieten a room?+
It will take the edge off. A wool piece is not studio treatment — it will not soundproof a wall against a neighbour — but on a hard plaster or concrete surface it noticeably shortens the ring on speech and television. Larger pieces and deeper carving do more, and two pieces on opposing walls do more than one.
Living with it
Wool this good deserves to be looked after.
How to vacuum it, how to clean a spill, and the twenty-year guarantee behind every piece.