10'2" x 14' Oriental Rug | French Aubusson Design, Brown Field, Ivory Floral Medallion | Brand New

This is a brand new hand-knotted room-size piece that borrows its drawing from 18th century French Aubusson and Savonnerie floor weaving: a quiet open ground, one restrained oval medallion, and florals that behave like a painted still life rather than a repeating pattern. At 10'2" x 14" of finished width and length it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat dining table, and it sits naturally alongside other 10x14 rugs in the collection. The pile is a soft, high-lustre wool on a cotton foundation, knotted by hand knot by knot, with the florals sculpted so they stand slightly proud of the brown ground. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming it as a genuine hand-knotted piece.

Design and Motifs

The composition is deliberately spare. A single ivory oval cartouche sits at the center, outlined in slate blue and ringed by a chain of camel and gold husk motifs, and inside it a loose bouquet of open roses, a brown and cream peony, small 5 petal blossoms and long sage and teal leaves fans out in a single asymmetric spray. Above and below the medallion sit 2 small urn and acanthus finials, a direct quotation from French cartoon drawing. All 4 corners of the field carry a matching rose spray, and a fine gold outline runs as a thin rectangle just inside the border, framing the field the way a gilt moulding frames a panel. The main border is a slate blue band filled with a continuous camel and ivory acanthus leaf vine, with a corner palmette resolving each turn, and the whole thing is contained by plain brown guard bands and hand-tied ivory cotton fringe.

A Deep Brown Field with Ivory, Sage and Rose

The field is a deep chocolate brown with a faint aubergine cast where the light hits it straight on, and a warmer cocoa tone where the nap lies away from you. Against that, the medallion ground is a soft unbleached ivory, almost clotted cream, which is what carries the eye to the center. The bouquet works in sage green, dusty teal and olive for the foliage, powder pink and shell rose for the open flowers, and a cinnamon brown for the single large peony. The border swaps to a muted slate blue-grey, cool enough to keep the brown from going flat, with the leaf vine drawn in camel, tobacco gold and ivory. Fringe and the fine outline lines read ivory to pale gold. The palette is low contrast and warm, which makes a dark room feel settled rather than heavy, and the ivory and rose notes keep it from reading as a solid brown floor.

Hand-Knotted in India in the French Aubusson Tradition

This piece is honestly made in India, and that is a recommendation. India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced, and the better north Indian workshops weave French Aubusson and Savonnerie cartoons to a standard that older European manufactories would recognise: clean curved outlines on the oval cartouche, florals shaded through 3 and 4 tones of the same color, and a border vine that turns the corner properly instead of being cut off. The folded-corner photograph shows a dense, evenly beaten pile on a cotton foundation with no looseness at the selvage, and the sculpted relief around the flowers is the result of careful clipping after the pile was knotted. If you are weighing a piece like this against a Oriental rug from a different weaving region, the difference here is the European drawing rather than the knotting technique, which is the same hand-tied knot used across the whole tradition.