11'10" x 18' Jaipur Oriental Rug | Deep Apple Red All Over Floral | Never Used Oversize Wool

At 11'10" x 18", this is a true palace-scale floor covering, hand-knotted in India in the Jaipur tradition and never put into use. The wool pile is clipped to 3/8", low enough to read every leaf tip and stem in the drawing yet still dense underfoot, and the weave sits on a cotton foundation that keeps a rug this long lying flat and square. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted piece, and because it belongs to the small group of genuine 12x18 oversize rugs we carry, it is meant for the one room in a house nothing standard will cover. The back photo shows even, tight knotting corner to corner with no repairs, no restoration and no wear anywhere in the pile.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion. Instead the field carries a large-scale all over floral composition built from broad palmettes, open rosettes and long serrated leaves that swing off thick vines, the kind of generous classical drawing that only reads properly at this length. The close-up shows one rosette opening into an 8 petal star with a slate blue center, flanked by lobed palmettes shaded from camel through pale ivory so each blossom lifts off the ground color. Smaller blossoms and curled leaf tendrils fill the spaces between the big forms, and the whole layout mirrors down the long axis so the pattern stays balanced whether you enter from the ends or the sides. The midnight blue main border runs a continuous meander of gold palmettes and leaf sprays, corners resolved cleanly rather than cut off, and is framed on both sides by narrow camel and ivory guard stripes carrying a small repeating leaf motif.

Color

The field is a deep apple red, a warm brick-toned red with more brown in it than a fire red, and it shifts gently across the width as the light moves along the pile. Over that ground the pattern is worked almost entirely in golds: burnished antique gold in the palmette bodies, softer camel in the vines, and pale ivory used as a highlight at the outer edge of petals and leaf tips. Cool accents keep the warm palette honest, with sage green and muted slate blue appearing inside rosette centers, leaf veins and the occasional small blossom. The midnight blue border is the darkest value in the rug and gives the red field a clear frame, while the guard stripes in camel and oatmeal ivory step the eye down to the red outer edge and the natural ivory fringe. Against oak or walnut flooring, as the photographs show, the red reads rich rather than bright.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is one of the workshop centers that has made India the source of most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted weaving, and this piece shows why: consistent knot lines over 18 feet, clean color registration on curved stems, and a firm handle with no buckling. Weavers there work the classical floral vocabulary of the wider Oriental rug tradition on upright looms, wool on cotton, with the pile sheared low so fine drawing is not lost in a heavy nap. The selvedges are wrapped tight and straight, the ends are finished with a plain red kilim band and knotted fringe, and the back shows the neat ribbed rows of a rug woven at a single tension by an experienced team. Pieces at this width, 142" across, take many months on the loom and rarely come out of a workshop unused, which is what makes this one worth looking at closely.