12'8" x 19'2" Bokhara Rug | Palace Size Turkoman Gul Design | Never Used, Soft Wool Pile

At 12'8" x 19'2", this hand-knotted Bokhara covers roughly 242 square feet, which puts it in true palace territory and among the largest pieces we stock in oversize rugs. It was woven in Pakistan on a cotton foundation with a soft, high-luster wool pile, and it has never been on a floor: the nap is full from selvage to selvage, the ivory fringe on both ends is intact and even, and the plain red end skirts show no abrasion. A rug of this footprint normally ships freight with a surcharge, and here it ships free to all 50 states with our own drivers covering the Northeast. Every rug leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity stating size, materials, origin and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is the classic Bokhara formula, an all-over repeat of octagonal guls, the motif collectors also call the elephant foot, drawn in staggered rows and quartered inside by small hooked bars. Between the rows of guls sit narrow cruciform sprays with tiny leaf tips, so the eye reads two alternating rhythms rather than one flat grid. Because the rug is so long, the repeat runs to a high count of guls, and the weaver kept the rows straight and the spacing even the whole 19'2", which is the real test of drawing discipline on a piece this size. The frame is built from a stack of bands rather than a single wide border: a broad main band of small stars and rosettes, then a diamond lattice band filled with alternating ivory, tan and sage blocks, then several thin guard stripes of dotted meander. Both ends finish with a plain red skirt and a cotton fringe.

A Deep Madder Red Ground with Ivory, Black and Brown

The ground is a deep saturated red with a madder cast, warm rather than orange, and the wool takes light so strongly that the field shifts from bright crimson to a darker wine tone depending on where you stand, exactly as the angled photos show. Against that ground the guls are outlined in a hard charcoal black, which is what makes them read crisply from across a large room, and filled with ivory and a soft tan brown. Muted sage and celadon accents appear inside the gul interiors, in the rosettes of the main border and in the lattice band, and they cool the red down just enough to keep the whole surface from going monochrome. The ivory fringe and pale end skirts give the perimeter a clean light edge. It is a red rug for a room with dark wood, brass and warm neutrals, and it will anchor a formal dining or great room table setting without fighting the furniture.

Bokhara Weaving in Pakistan

The Bokhara design belongs to the Turkoman tribes of Central Asia, and it survives today largely because workshops in Pakistan adopted it and refined it into some of the most consistently well-made hand-knotted work on the market. This is a workshop piece in that tradition: a cotton warp and weft for stability at palace scale, a dense knot count that keeps the small gul interiors legible, and a plush, tightly clipped wool pile that feels soft underfoot without going floppy. The close photographs of the border show the knotting clearly, with each guard stripe only a few knots wide and still drawn accurately. If you are weighing this against other origins, our guide on Persian rugs vs Oriental rugs explains where a Pakistani Bokhara sits in the wider family, and why weave quality, not country name alone, is what you should be judging.