10'1" x 13'10" Oushak Rug | Gray Field with Sky Blue Border | Hand-Knotted Wool, Made in India

This is a brand new, never used hand-knotted wool rug in the Oushak tradition, woven in India at a generous 10'1" x 13'10". The weaver has taken the classic Oushak vocabulary of loose, wide spaced blossoms and set it over a soft gray field, then wrapped the whole thing in a wide sky blue border, which is what gives the piece its quiet, almost weathered look straight off the loom. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, cut at a medium height that lets the blues and browns sit slightly forward of the gray ground. It is a room sized rug rather than a scatter piece, and it reads as a contemporary Oriental rug that will sit comfortably with modern furniture. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the field carries a true all over design, built from staggered rows of angular palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, hexagonal blossom cartouches and small stepped crosses, each one linked by thin leaf and vine stems that wander rather than repeat mechanically. Look at the corner detail and you can see how the drawing stays deliberately blocky: outlines step rather than curve, which is exactly how Oushak weaving handles a flower. The main border runs a scrolling vine with alternating rosettes and cupped palmettes, flanked on both sides by narrow guard bands of reciprocal trefoils and a fine dark meander. The field motifs shift color from one repeat to the next, so no two rows look identical across nearly 14 feet of length, and that variation is what keeps a large all over rug from feeling like printed wallpaper.

Gray Ground, Sky Blue Border, Brown Accents

The field is a medium slate gray with a faint violet cast, the kind of tone that shifts with the light and photographs slightly cooler than it looks in a room. Against it the weaver has worked three registers of blue: a pale powder blue in the smaller blossoms, a stronger denim blue in the palmettes, and the wide sky blue of the main border, which is the single brightest element in the rug. Warm colors do the balancing. Cocoa and walnut brown outline several of the larger flower heads, soft gold and camel fill the vine work, and clean ivory highlights pick out flower centers and the odd rosette so the eye has somewhere to land. Charcoal outlining separates the border from the field. For anyone shopping gray and charcoal rugs, this is a gray that carries real color rather than a flat neutral.

Made in India in the Oushak Tradition

Oushak is a western Anatolian design tradition, but most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made in India, and this rug is a fair example of why. The knotting is even from selvedge to selvedge, the back shows a clear, regular grid with no pulled rows, the selvedges are tightly overcast and the fringe is a clean extension of the cotton warps rather than a sewn on addition. Weaving a piece this size on one loom takes months of continuous work by a team, and holding the drawing steady over 166 inches of length is the part that separates a well made large rug from a cheap one. At 10'1" x 13'10" it belongs with the true 10x14 area rugs, big enough to carry a full seating group with all legs on the wool, and it ships free anywhere in the 50 states despite the weight.