Designer Sara Story translates the art and landscape of Texas into Hill Country, a new rug collection with Christopher Farr
AD100 designer Sara Story draws on the vast Texas landscape, the art of Louise Bourgeois and memories of Houston and Marfa for a deeply personal collection exploring colour, pattern, scale and perspective.
For American designer Sara Story, interiors, art, architecture and landscape have never existed as separate worlds. They form part of the same visual language — one shaped by the places she has lived and travelled, the art she has encountered and collected, and a longstanding fascination with colour, pattern and scale.
That language now moves from interiors to the floor with Hill Country, a new collection of rugs that reflects her longstanding dialogue between art, landscape, and architecture. The collection features three distinct designs: Spider, Landscape, and Grid in four colorways: Texas Sky, Limestone, Cacti, and Texas Rose, each drawing inspiration from Story’s upbringing in Texas and the impact art had on her from a young age. Raised in a family immersed in the arts—her mother was a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston—Story developed an enduring appreciation for contemporary art that continues to inform her design practice today.
From Louise Bourgeois to the floor
Art has been part of Story’s life from an early age. Raised in a family immersed in the arts — her mother was a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston — she developed an enduring relationship with contemporary art that continues to shape the way she approaches interiors, objects and space.
The most explicit expression of that relationship in Hill Country is Spider. The design takes its inspiration from Louise Bourgeois’ iconic Spider (1996), which Story encountered repeatedly at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she spent countless hours while growing up and living in the city.
Rather than translating the sculpture literally, Story responds to a quality that has long fascinated her in Bourgeois’ work: the tension between delicacy and strength. The resulting pattern is fluid and expressive, almost like a line drawn freely by hand. Seen from a distance, it reads as an atmospheric composition; closer up, its movement and irregularity begin to reveal themselves.
It reflects an idea central to Story’s work: that what we see depends on how and from where we look.
When landscape becomes pattern
The Texas landscape provides the collection’s other great point of departure.
Story looked particularly to Marfa and the surroundings of the Judd Foundation, translating their muted, sun-washed tones into a palette that feels at once nostalgic and contemporary. Texas Sky, Limestone, Cacti and Texas Rose evoke the colours of a landscape marked by vast distances, intense light and quiet shifts in tone.
In Landscape and Grid, place becomes geometry. Seen from above, the Texas terrain unfolds as an abstract composition of squares, rectangles, boundaries and expanses. Story transforms that perspective into graphic structures that appear minimal at first sight but reveal increasing complexity with proximity.
Landscape is the boldest and most architectural of the three, establishing a strong visual foundation within a room. Grid is quieter, introducing rhythm through a more restrained geometry and refined texture. Spider, by contrast, brings movement, emotion and a freer gesture.
Together, they explore a recurring tension in Story’s work: structure and softness, precision and spontaneity, distance and detail.
Two creative worlds meet through rugs
The collaboration with Christopher Farr grew from a shared understanding of rugs as more than functional interior objects. Since its establishment in 1988, Christopher Farr has brought contemporary design and traditional textile craftsmanship into dialogue, working with the legacies of artists and designers including Josef and Anni Albers as well as contemporary names such as Ilse Crawford, John Pawson, Commune and Studio Shamshiri.
For Story, this made the partnership particularly natural. Her memories of Texas, encounters with art and instinctive approach to colour and pattern met Christopher Farr’s deep knowledge of textiles, craftsmanship and the possibilities of the rug as a creative medium.
Rather than a conventional designer-manufacturer relationship, Hill Country developed through an ongoing conversation around scale, colour, texture and materiality — gradually translating visual references and memories into objects made to be lived with.
The result embodies Story’s wider philosophy towards interiors. Designed to be both elevated and approachable, the collection speaks to those who appreciate art and design while wanting spaces that feel comfortable and lived-in. The patterns are playful yet sophisticated, the palette is effortlessly livable, and the materials are crafted for durability. As a result, the rugs transition seamlessly between traditional and contemporary interiors, feeling equally at home in family residences and more formal settings.
For Story, the rugs are therefore not a departure from her interior practice, but an extension of it: another way of exploring how art, landscape, architecture and memory can shape the spaces in which we live.
Selection of images (credit: Weston Wells, download here)
About Sara Story Design
Since founding Sara Story Design in 2003, Sara Story has built an internationally recognized practice known for its distinctive aesthetic, shaped by her travels, passion for contemporary art and fashion, and disciplined approach to life.
Her firm’s first two decades were chronicled in The Art of Home (Rizzoli, 2023), and in 2026 she was again named to Architectural Digest’s prestigious AD100 list. Her work has been featured in leading publications including Architectural Digest, Interior Design, Galerie, LUXE, Cultured, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, while her firm continues to lead residential and commercial projects worldwide. Story holds degrees from the University of San Diego and the Academy of Art University and is deeply engaged in the arts through initiatives such as her Texas-based artist residency program, board and leadership roles with cultural institutions including the New Museum, Ballroom Marfa, the Guggenheim Museum, and Proyecto Dracula, and membership in the Design Leadership Network. Beyond design, she is a two-time marathon finisher and has summited Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak.
About Christopher Farr
Established in 1988, Christopher Farr are expert rug producers who set out to unite heritage textile craftsmanship with contemporary design vision. Since then, they have maintained a dedication to quality and an uncompromising pursuit of beauty that has helped revolutionise rug design and restore rug-making to the status of fine art.
Adept at producing custom rugs and limited edition artworks, their portfolio includes designs by visionaries such as Josef and Anni Albers, and world renowned design studios and creatives including Ilse Crawford, John Pawson, Commune and Studio Shamshiri. With in-depth knowledge of materials, production techniques and finishing, and an extensive design library, their technical skill is unrivalled, producing rugs for private residential, leading hotels, global retail brands, work spaces and art collections.
With showrooms in London, Los Angeles and New York, they operate internationally.