11'10" x 14'8" Chobi Peshawar Rug | Soft Gray All Over Floral Field | Perfect Condition

Some rugs argue with a room and some rugs settle it. This one settles it. At 11'10" x 14'8" it covers a full great room or a long formal living room, and yet the first impression is quiet: a wide gray field with an all over floral drawing that only reveals itself as you walk across it. The pile is a short 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted a knot at a time, and the weave sits flat and even from selvage to selvage with no buckling and no wave. It is a contemporary Oriental rug in perfect, never used condition, and like every piece we sell it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted, along with the origin, material and measurements recorded above.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is an all over Sultanabad style layout with no central medallion, which is exactly why it works in a big room where furniture will cover part of the floor. Large rounded palmettes and teardrop forms are set on a slow, open vine that repeats up the field, each one outlined in a thin rust line that acts as the only real drawing edge in the whole piece. Between them sit small 8 petal rosettes, split leaves and curling tendrils, all filled in tones barely a shade away from the ground so the pattern reads as texture first and pattern second. The main border carries the same rhythm at a smaller scale, a run of paired teardrops and rosettes linked by a leaf scroll, held between narrow guard stripes. Look at the close photographs and you can see how much of the design is carried by shading rather than by contrast, which takes a confident weaver working from a careful cartoon.

The Gray Palette Up Close

The field is a soft gray that carries a warm undertone, closer to greige and pale sand than to a cool steel gray, and it shifts with the light through the day. Over that ground the motifs are drawn in ivory, oatmeal, pale honey tan and a faint dusty apricot, with the thin outlines in a muted brick rust that is the strongest color anywhere on the rug and still reads as a whisper. The border lightens toward cream, which frames the field without cutting it off, and the wool has a low sheen that makes the whole surface look slightly silvered when you view it down the length. For a buyer working with white oak floors, linen upholstery, brass or blackened steel, this is the useful end of gray and charcoal rugs: neutral enough to disappear under strong furniture, warm enough that the room never goes cold.

Peshawar Weaving and Chobi Quality

Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan has become one of the most reliable sources of good hand-knotted work made today, and Chobi is its best known type, the name referring to the wood and plant dye tradition the style grew out of. The wool is spun for body rather than gloss, the knotting is tight and regular, and the finished rug is given a soft wash that pulls the colors back and gives new weaving the calm of something already lived with. Weaving a piece at this scale takes a loom wide enough for two or three weavers side by side and many months of work, which is why clean, square, low pile examples in the 12x15 range are worth holding on to. Pieces this large usually attract a freight surcharge; here it is one of our oversize hand-knotted rugs that ships free to all 50 states.