10' x 13'2" Modern Gabbeh Rug | Neutral Gray Striated Wool Field | Brand New, Never Used

This is a big, calm, almost silent floor piece. At 10' x 13'2" it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat dining table, and it does it without a single competing pattern: an open striated field of natural soft wool, no border, and three quiet rows of tiny woven marks placed like punctuation. It is hand-knotted on a cotton foundation, brand new and never used, and the wool has that dry, slightly lustrous hand that only shows up in a good undyed fleece. If you have been sorting through modern and contemporary rugs and finding everything either too busy or machine flat, this is the other end of that search, and it sits squarely in the most useful of the 10x13 rug sizes. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted.

Design and Motifs

The drawing here is deliberately sparse, which is the whole point of the Gabbeh idea: an open field carries the rug and a handful of small marks give the eye somewhere to land. Three narrow bands run across the width, one near each end and one through the center, built from 4 armed cross motifs, tiny checkerboard squares and rows of single dots in soft brown and charcoal. A short vertical column of the same marks runs up through the middle of the field, visible in the close detail shots. There is no border and no medallion, so nothing frames or interrupts the surface. What fills the remaining space is texture rather than pattern: fine vertical striations from the hand-spun yarn, running the full 13'2" length, shifting a shade lighter or darker as the wool batches change. Seen from across a room it reads as a single tone with movement in it; seen up close it is clearly hand-drawn work, with the motifs sitting slightly irregular along their rows the way knotted marks always do.

A Neutral Gray That Changes With the Light

The base color is a mid neutral gray, but it is not a flat painted gray. Under daylight the field leans toward warm taupe and sand beige, with pale silver highlights where the pile catches the light and a faint olive cast in the low areas. Under warm indoor lighting it settles into a soft greige that sits comfortably next to oak, walnut, linen and white plaster. The only saturated color in the entire rug is in the motifs: a dark cocoa brown and a smoky charcoal, each no bigger than a fingertip, which is exactly enough contrast to keep the surface from looking blank. Because the tone is undyed and tonal rather than uniform, it hides ordinary household traffic far better than a solid pale rug, and it will not fight an existing color scheme. If you are shopping the gray and charcoal rugs range for something warm rather than cold, this is the warm end of it.

Woven in India: Contemporary Hand-Knotting at Scale

India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and this piece shows why. A 10 foot wide loom, a cotton warp and weft, and a full 13'2" of knotting done by hand takes months, and the workshops there have the depth of skilled weavers to do it consistently. The back photo shows a clean, even, tightly beaten weave with straight rows and no pulled edges, and the selvages are finished by hand. The wool is the real story: natural soft fleece, hand-spun so the yarn varies slightly in thickness, which is what produces the striation on the face and the plush, forgiving feel underfoot. This is an Oriental rug in the technical sense, hand-knotted on a loom in Asia, but the aesthetic is squarely modern, and it is built to be walked on for decades rather than replaced.