10' x 14' Bokhara Oriental Rug | Repeating Gul Field | Fine Soft Wool, Never Used

A Bokhara gets chosen for the same reason a navy suit does: the pattern is disciplined enough that it never fights the rest of the room. This one measures 10' x 14', hand-knotted in fine soft wool on a cotton foundation, clipped low and evenly so that the small repeating drawing stays legible across a field this wide. It has never been on a floor. The original workshop label and the hang tag marked Genuine Hand Woven Oriental Rug are still attached and photographed beside a tape measure in the final image, and the pile still carries the full nap of a piece that went from the loom straight into storage. If you are working to a 10 x 14 footprint, this covers a large seating group edge to edge with room for chair legs to stay on the wool. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a strict all over repeating design: rows of octagonal guls, the flattened medallion that collectors call the elephant foot, each one quartered by a cross axis and filled with hooked latch motifs and small stepped forms. Between every pair of gul rows sits a band of secondary motifs, stepped diamonds with antler-like arms reaching out at 4 corners, which keeps the grid from reading as mechanical. The borders are where the weaver spent real time: a wide main band of alternating rosettes set in ivory and apricot cartouches, flanked on both sides by narrow guard stripes of dotted lattice, sawtooth and reciprocal trefoil, and finished with an outer band of interlocking zigzag lozenges. Counting inward from the selvedge there are numerous separate stripes before you reach the field, and the close-up border photographs show every one of them drawn cleanly, without the crowding you see when a weaver runs out of room. The straight lines stay straight the full 14' length, which on a rug this size is the honest test of loom tension and drawing.

The Warm Beige Field, Charcoal Guls and Apricot Accents

The ground is a warm beige that leans camel, with a faint apricot glow where the light catches the nap, and it is that single quiet tone that makes the rug so easy to place against oak, walnut, limestone or a pale wall. Sitting on it, the guls are outlined in a near-black charcoal brown that reads as black at a distance and resolves into deep coffee brown up close. Inside each gul the weaver worked in three supporting tones: a soft slate grey at the cross axis, a clean undyed ivory in the outer lobes, and a muted apricot that picks up the ground and warms the whole motif. The border repeats the same palette at higher contrast, with charcoal grounds throwing the ivory and apricot rosettes forward. The overall effect is neutral without being flat: from across a room it reads beige and black, and only up close does the apricot, grey and ivory detail appear. The ivory fringe at both ends is hand tied and bright against the camel end finish.

Woven in Pakistan in the Bokhara Tradition

The Bokhara gul comes out of the Turkoman tribal weaving tradition of Central Asia, and it was carried south by weavers who settled in Pakistan, where the workshops of Lahore and the surrounding towns refined it into one of the most recognisable patterns in the trade. This piece is a good example of why that work sells: the knotting is tight and regular, the back is crisp enough to read the pattern from the reverse as the folded corner photograph shows, and the wool is the fine soft grade rather than the coarse fleece used on cheaper production. It is a true hand-knotted Oriental rug, knot by knot on a cotton foundation, not a tufted or machine-made imitation of the design. At 10' x 14' with an unused pile and its original tags still on, it is a rug bought at the start of its life rather than partway through it.