11'8" x 12' Square Soltanabad Design Rug | Orange Red & Ivory All Over Floral | New, Made in India

A true square at 11'8" x 12', this rug covers 140 square feet and was woven to fill a room rather than sit under a coffee table. The pile is natural wool, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation, and the wool still carries the soft sheen you can see in the close-up photographs, a lanolin-rich handle that only unwashed, hand-spun yarn gives you. Squares this large are genuinely hard to find, because a loom set 12 feet wide ties up a workshop for the better part of a year, and most buyers hunting a square end up settling for a 9x12 instead. This one is brand new and in perfect condition, with full even pile from corner to corner, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted, one-of-a-kind piece. If you are comparing formats, it sits at the top end of our large hand-knotted rugs.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a Soltanabad pattern: no central medallion, just a continuous flowering vine that climbs the field in a loose diamond lattice. Broad serrated leaves alternate with large lobed palmettes and 8 petal rosettes, each one outlined in ivory so the motif reads clearly against the dark ground, and small stemmed buds fill the gaps between the vines. Look at the field close-up and you can see how the weaver staggered the repeat, so no two adjacent blossoms carry the same shading. The main border is generous, close to 15 inches deep, with an ivory ground carrying angular open blossoms and curling acanthus leaves, framed by a narrow reciprocating trefoil inner stripe and a plain rust outer band. The corners resolve cleanly, a good sign that the design was drawn for this exact square rather than cropped from a rectangular cartoon. Buyers who like this kind of continuous repeat should browse our all over floral rugs.

Color Palette

The field is an orange red, closer to brick and terracotta than to a cool cherry, and it moves. Horizontal bands of lighter and deeper tone run across the ground, the natural abrash of hand-spun wool dyed in small lots, which is exactly what keeps a field this large from looking flat or printed. Against it, the ivory of the vines and the wide border is a warm cream rather than a stark white, with the border ground shading toward soft sand in places. The blossoms are built from three quieter tones working together: a muted olive and moss green in the leaves, a gold to honey brown in the palmette centers, and a pale blue-grey that cools the whole palette and shows up in the leaf tips and petal shading. Small garnet red rosettes pick out the inner guard stripe. Overall it reads warm and lit rather than heavy, and it will sit comfortably with wood tones, cream upholstery and brass.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug is made in India, where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced, and we say that with confidence. The Soltanabad drawing comes out of the old west Persian workshop tradition, but the weaving here is entirely Indian, from the hand-spun wool to the vegetable-tone dye lots, and the workshops carrying this repertoire have been at it for three generations. The back photograph shows the story: tight, regular rows of knots, a sturdy cotton warp and weft, straight selvages and hand-tied fringe finished flat at both ends. The pile is cut at a medium height, high enough to give a dense underfoot feel in a room this size and short enough to keep the palmette outlines crisp. If you are weighing it against a Persian piece, our guide on the difference between a Persian and an Oriental rug is worth 5 minutes before you decide.