11'10" x 15' Oriental Rug | Black All-Over Floral Field | Sage Green Border | Made in India

At 11'10" x 15' this is a true room-size piece, the kind of floor covering that runs under a full seating group or a 12 seat dining table and still shows border on all 4 sides. The field is a deep, near-ink black covered end to end with a scrolling floral lattice, and the wide pale sage green main border lifts the whole thing so it never reads heavy. It is hand-knotted in India on a cotton foundation with a dense wool pile, a scale that puts it squarely among our oversize rugs, and it is a good example of how carefully drawn a modern hand-knotted Oriental rug can be. Condition is excellent, with even pile and clean, straight sides, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The design is a continuous all-over composition: thin curling vines split, cross and rejoin across the entire field, carrying serrated leaves, small rosettes, star flowers and lotus heads, with larger palmettes and teardrop boteh cartouches set at regular intervals down the center line and out toward the sides. Look closely at the field detail and you can see how the drawing is built, each blossom outlined in ivory so it separates cleanly from the black ground, each vine tapering to a single knot at the tip. The wide border repeats the same vocabulary at a larger scale, alternating broad fan-shaped palmettes with upright flowering sprays, and the 4 corners are resolved properly rather than simply cut off, which is a mark of a competent cartoon and a disciplined weaver. Narrow ivory guard stripes with a running rosette meander separate the border from the field on both edges.

Black, Sage and Olive: Reading the Color

The field is black, but it is a wool black rather than a flat printed black, with a slight brown warmth in the deepest passages that keeps it from going dead. Against it the palette is almost entirely garden greens: apple green and olive in the large palmettes, a dusty sea green in the leaves, and a soft celadon that makes up the whole main border. Ivory does the outlining work throughout and also fills the guard stripes and the fringe, while small hits of gold, ochre, rust and a deep burgundy appear inside the flower heads. The corner detail shows a clear turquoise blue picked into the border blossoms, a cool accent that keeps the greens from reading monotone. Practically speaking, a dark field of this size is forgiving in a busy room, and the green border gives you an easy bridge to natural wood, brass, cream upholstery and deep jewel tones.

Woven in India: Knotting and Quality

India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and we say that with confidence: the classical workshop tradition around Agra and the northern weaving belt never stopped, and the best Indian looms today produce drawing and knot density that would have been called workshop grade anywhere. This rug is a straightforward example. The back photograph, shot against an inch ruler, shows tight, regular knot rows on a cotton foundation with no slack and no drift in the row spacing, which is what allows the ivory outlining to stay crisp over a 15 foot length. The wool is well spun and has been clipped at a medium height, dense enough underfoot to take heavy furniture and daily traffic without crushing. For buyers comparing traditional Oriental rugs at this scale, the combination of an honest hand-knotted weave, a fully resolved all-over cartoon and excellent condition is the part worth paying attention to.