10' x 14' Chinese Needlepoint Rug | French Garden Floral Flatweave | New & Never Used

This is a room size needlepoint in the French garden manner, hand woven in wool at 10' x 14' with no border at all, so the vine simply grows from edge to edge the way it would across a piece of embroidered linen. The weave is flat and tight, the pile sits low, and the whole surface has the matte, slightly chalky finish that separates real hand worked needlepoint from a printed or machine made imitation. Because it is flat woven, it slides under doors and dining chairs where a thick pile rug will not, which is part of why buyers looking at 10x14 rugs for a formal room keep coming back to this construction. The piece is new, never laid, and ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming it as a genuine handmade Oriental rug.

Design and Motifs

A single family of thin brown stems wanders the full field, curling into tight scrolls at the tip and throwing off maple shaped leaves, narrow willow leaves and small closed buds as it goes. Nothing is mirrored and nothing repeats mechanically, which is the pleasure of an all over floral design drawn by hand. At intervals the vine resolves into clustered berries, 8 to 12 round fruits grouped like currants or small grapes, and these clusters are the only real punctuation in an otherwise quiet field. There is no medallion, no spandrel and no border, so the eye reads the rug as a stretch of garden wall rather than as a framed picture. Furniture can sit anywhere on it without cutting a pattern in half, which is the practical argument for a borderless drawing in a 14 foot room.

Colors: Ivory Ground with Olive, Rose and Rust

The ground is a warm ivory that leans toward pale straw under lamplight and toward cream in daylight, with a soft tonal drift across the width that comes from dye lot changes in the wool rather than from any wear. Foliage is worked in at least 4 separate greens: a deep olive on the larger leaves, a dusty sage, a pale celadon, and a khaki that reads almost tan where it meets the field. The stems run in a cocoa brown and a lighter cinnamon. Against all of that restraint the berries carry the heat, a true rust red beside softer rose, salmon and apricot tones, and inside several clusters there are small grey-blue and powder blue fruits that keep the reds from going sweet. Bud tips pick up a burnt orange. It is a low contrast, pale palette overall, the kind that lightens a dark floor without going cold.

Origin: Needlepoint Weaving in China

Needlepoint floor coverings of this type are made in China today by workshops that took up the 18th century French Aubusson and Savonnerie garden vocabulary and now execute it better and more consistently than almost anyone else. The wool is stitched over a cotton canvas foundation, point by point, and the count of those stitches is what governs how smoothly a curved stem can be drawn: on this piece the scrolls close cleanly and the leaf shading steps in small increments, both signs of a careful hand. If you are weighing this against a knotted pile piece, our guide to the difference between Persian and Oriental rugs is worth 5 minutes. What you get here is a flat, light, hard wearing wool surface at 10' x 14', made entirely by hand and untouched since it came off the frame.