11'8" x 15'4" Chobi Peshawar Oriental Rug | Black Ziegler All Over Design | Ivory Border, Never Used

At 11'8" x 15'4", or 140 inches across by 184 inches long, this Chobi Peshawar belongs in the small group of oversize 12x15 Oriental rugs that can swallow a 12 seat dining table or furnish an entire open plan great room with floor to spare. The pile is wool cut at 5/16 inch, hand-knotted row by row on a cotton foundation, and the rug is brand new and never used. What sets it apart from the usual soft gold and rust work out of Peshawar is the ground: a deep ink black field, drawn over in ivory vinework and set against a wide sand ivory border. Every piece we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a Ziegler all over design with no central medallion, so the pattern repeats and mirrors across the whole field instead of pulling the eye to one point. Thin ivory vines loop into large open circles, and inside them sit big cream palmettes with small black and rose centers, flanked by forked, serrated leaves that lean and curl like acanthus. The field is outlined in a cusped, lobed edge where it meets the border rather than a straight line, a detail worth noticing on a rug this large. The main border is wide and runs a meandering vine of palmettes and leafy rosettes, punctuated at regular intervals by small 8 petal rosettes in solid black that pick the field color back up. A narrow guard stripe separates border from field, and a plain black outer band finishes the rug just inside the ivory fringe, which frames the whole composition the way a mat frames a print.

Ink Black Field, Ivory and Soft Gold Border

The field reads as a dense ink black with a slightly blue cast in raking light, and the close detail shots show the gentle horizontal striation of hand-dyed wool rather than a flat printed black. Against it, the vinework is bone ivory, while the palmettes and leaves move through cream, oatmeal, butter gold and a dusty blush rose, with occasional apricot and muted olive green on the leaf tips. The border is the softest part of the palette: sand and ivory at the top, warming into a honeyed gold along one long side, with faint lilac and taupe shading inside the palmettes. That tonal drift is characteristic of the washed Chobi finish and gives the rug the settled look of an older piece. For rooms built on charcoal, cream and walnut, this is exactly the sort of high contrast ground that black and ivory Oriental rugs are bought for.

Woven in Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar, in the northwest of Pakistan, is the home of the Chobi weave, and it is the reason this rug exists in this size and this quality. Chobi describes the muted, wood-toned wash the finished rug receives, and the Ziegler drawing is the late 19th century commercial design vocabulary these workshops adopted and made their own for Western interiors. The weaving here is honest village and workshop work: single-knotted wool on cotton warps, a tight and even knot count visible in the corner shots, firm selvages and a pile left at 5/16 inch so the ivory outlines stay crisp. The back is flat and regular across all 184 inches of length, which on a loom this wide takes a disciplined team and months of steady work. If you are comparing weaving traditions before you commit, our guide on what separates one Oriental rug from another is a useful place to start.