11'10" x 14'11" Chinese Art Deco Rug | Ivory Open Field, Black Floral Border | Never Used

This is a warehouse piece that went into storage and never made it onto a floor. The field is a single sweep of pale ivory wool that shifts toward warm taupe as the light crosses it, and it is held inside a deep black border deep enough to read as a frame rather than a stripe. Flowering branches, lotus stems and lidded vases spill across that black ground and break over the inner guard line into the open center, which is the drawing signature of the Chinese Art Deco workshops. At 11'10" x 14'11" it belongs with our oversize 12x15 rugs, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, the wool pile and the Chinese origin.

Design and Motifs

The composition is asymmetric by intention. There is no medallion and no repeating border run; instead the weaver placed a handful of set pieces around the 4 corners and let the rest of the ground stay empty. A ribbed grey vase holds bamboo leaves and lotus blossoms at one corner, a second vase sits at the opposite end, and long flowering branches of prunus, peony and chrysanthemum climb up and over the thin ivory guard line into the field. A lidded urn and a small perched bird form appear along the upper border. The outlines are carved, meaning the pile is sheared down along each petal and leaf edge so the motif stands in relief, a technique you can see clearly in the close corner photographs. That combination of a near empty ground, sculpted floral clusters and a black frame is what separates Deco drawing from traditional all over work.

Ivory, Taupe and a Deep Black Frame

The field reads ivory in flat light and greige to soft taupe when the nap runs away from you, which gives the surface a silvery movement that photographs cannot fully carry. Against that quiet ground the black border is genuinely black, dense and matte, with no navy cast in the wool. The florals are worked in a controlled pastel range: rose and raspberry pink at the peony centers, blush and shell pink on the lotus petals, soft yellow and apricot in the open blossoms, and 3 or 4 tones of sage and celadon green through the leaves and bamboo. The vases are lavender grey with cream scrollwork. It is a restrained palette, warm enough to sit with wood and leather, cool enough to work in a grey or greige room, and the black outline keeps the whole thing from drifting into pastel prettiness.

Woven in China: The Art Deco Tradition

Chinese workshops built their reputation on a different set of virtues than the Persian centers did, and this piece shows them: a heavy, lofty wool pile with a soft hand, a clean cotton foundation, generous shearing and carved relief work rather than an extremely high knot count. Handle the edges in the detail shots and you can see the depth of the pile and the tightly overcast ivory selvage. Weaving something this size, 142" by 179", on a single loom with a field this open is harder than it looks, because any irregularity in tension or dye lot shows instantly on a plain ground, and here the ground runs even from end to end. If you are weighing how a piece like this sits next to Persian city weaving, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from a broader Oriental rug explains the distinction. Finding one of these in unused condition at 12x15 scale is the rare part.