Are Felted Wool Placemats Really the Best Placemats?

By Wilder Davies

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When I first heard the phrase "wool placemat," practicality didn't spring to mind. Quite the opposite. Placemats—at least the everyday ones—are ideally made of something you can easily wipe clean, rinse off, or throw in the wash because they will inevitably get dirty. Actually, the whole point is that they get dirty, protecting your table from spills. Right?

Sure, wool is a hardy material: It's naturally hydrophobic, antimicrobial, and resistant to wear. But the idea of a felted placemat still seemed precious to me. When I think of wool, I think "dry clean only." But when I read the product description for the felted wool placemats on the Graf Lantz website, the repeated emphasis on that word, practicality, had me curious. I was looking for a new set of durable, low-maintenance placemats, so I decided to get a set and put them through some tests to see how they stood up to regular wear.

I splattered these placemats with tomato sauce and turmeric-tinged oil, and dribbled red wine on top of them to see if their pristine felted surfaces would take on any stains. Since the placemats are made of tightly felted merino wool, liquids bead on their surfaces rather than immediately soaking in, preventing stains from going deep into the material. All I had to do to clean them was to wipe and dab with a wet cloth, and they looked good as new.

I also performed a test where I let the tomato sauce hang out on the placemat for an hour to give it a chance to soak in. The fabric did appear to absorb some color. But I followed the care instructions on the website and lifted the mark easily with the help of a little dish soap. After that I just let them air-dry, and the wool did its natural moisture wicking thing, without any shrinkage or warping. Compared to my more traditional cloth placemats, which bear the red and yellow battle scars of meals past even after spot treating and washing, these were far more resilient.

I thought I discovered a weakness in them after I placed a hot tea kettle on top of one of the placemats and found that it had left a compressed ring mark, but it faded after a quick steam and press with my iron.

And I would remiss not to mention how nice they look on the table. Because they are so simple, and come in so many colors, they will look at home on a very contemporary and ultra-modern tablescape, as well as on patrician, heavy wood furniture. Cat owners be warned though: If you leave them out at all times they may become your pet's new favorite spot.

We’ve become so conditioned to seeing machine-washability as the metric that distinguishes an everyday, practical home good from something more precious and delicate. It seems ludicrous now to think that a material capable of keeping fishermen warm while soaking wet would somehow be too fragile to weather a fork covered in tomato sauce. Yet that's what I (and many of my coworkers) thought before testing these placemats. But wool placemats prove those assumptions wrong, and they look great doing it.