Roll Out The Red Carpet

Laid out on the floor was a 46m-long stretch of rug, delivered by truck from Georgia a few days before, in the custom shade of Academy Red that is available only for the Oscars.

- Sarah Bahr

On a recent weekday morning in La Mirada, a suburb outside Los Angeles in the United States, Mr Steve Olive, 58, walked among hundreds of carpet rolls in red, green and lavender in a 36,000 sq ft warehouse.

Mr Olive may not be famous, but celebrities have strolled the plush craftsmanship of his carpets for nearly three decades.

His company, Event Carpet Pros, has supplied carpets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and Emmys, as well as for Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros movie premieres and the Super Bowl.

And, at a moment when carpets have moved beyond the classic red and become splashier and more intricate, Mr Olive's handiwork has become more prominent.

He has crafted custom designs such as a shimmering, sunlit pool carpet for the 2023 world premiere of the Barbie movie and a green-and-black ectoplasm drip carpet for the Ghostbusters world premiere in 2016 that took a month to create.

"I haven't come across anything that we couldn't do," said Mr Olive, who founded the company in 1992 with his brother-in-law, Mr Walter Clyne.

But recently - after a brief dalliance with a champagne shade two years ago - the Oscars opted for tradition and returned to a carpet in Mr Olive's exclusive Academy Red.