12' x 15' Aubusson Rug | Flat Weave Wool Tapestry | Black Field with Ivory Medallion | Brand New

This is a full 12' x 15' Aubusson in the flat tapestry technique, woven entirely in wool on a cotton warp with no pile at all, so the drawing sits flush with the surface like a painting rather than standing up in a clipped nap. At 180 square feet it is a true room-filling piece, drawn as a single composition rather than a repeating pattern, which is exactly what this format demands: one enormous ivory medallion floating on a matte black ground, framed by acanthus scrollwork that runs right out to the corners. It is brand new and has never been on a floor, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a handmade, hand-woven piece. Buyers shopping oversize 12x15 area rugs will notice how much thinner and lighter a flat weave is than a knotted piece of the same footprint, which makes it easy to live with under doors, under heavy furniture and in rooms where height matters.

Design and Motifs

The center is a large lobed cartouche medallion, cusped at the 4 sides and outlined with a braided laurel band, holding an inner oval of trailing rose sprays, ribbon swags and curling foliate horns around a small wreathed rosette at the exact midpoint. Two round wreath roundels, one at each end of the medallion, enclose pale sage leaf sprays, and at the top and bottom of the field sit small shield and quiver motifs with drooping tassels, straight out of the neoclassical decorative vocabulary. The black field around the medallion carries huge acanthus scrolls, each one unfurling into serrated leaves, single flat-faced blossoms and thin tendrils tipped with berries, mirrored across both long sides and both ends. The border is the classic Aubusson egg and dart band: a run of oval bosses separated by pointed leaf forms in gray-green, boxed by fine striped guards and finished with a broad plain black outer band. Each corner closes with its own rosette cartouche so that the border turns cleanly instead of colliding.

Color Palette

The field is a deep flat black with no sheen, and it does the heavy lifting, because every soft tone in the rug reads brighter against it. The medallion is a warm ivory that shades toward cream at the edges, with rose and salmon pink used for the flower heads, the ribbon work and the shaded oval bosses of the border. Gold runs through the laurel bands, the scroll stems and the striped guard lines, moving from a pale wheat to a deeper honey where the shading rolls over a curve. The greens are muted rather than fresh: sage, olive and a grayish celadon in the leaf sprays and the dart forms of the border. Small hits of true red appear in the berries and the tightest flower centers, and a soft gray-blue shows in the ribbon shadows and a few leaf tips. The overall effect is a dark, formal rug with a pastel heart, which is why this palette works so well with black lacquer, gilt, warm walnut and cream upholstery.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Aubusson is a town in central France whose workshops wove flat tapestry floor coverings for the aristocracy from the 17th century onward, and the design language here, the cusped medallion, the acanthus scroll and the egg and dart border, comes directly from that tradition. This piece was hand-woven in China, where the tapestry workshops have specialized in the Aubusson idiom for decades and produce it at a level of drawing and color separation that is genuinely hard to match. The technique is demanding in a way a pile weave is not: the weaver builds every color area separately, weft by weft, and the outline of each acanthus leaf has to be shaped by hand as the work grows, with no knot count to hide behind. The evidence is in the shading, where a single leaf moves through 4 or 5 tones without a jagged step, and in the way the medallion curve stays true across 12 feet of width. As an Oriental rug built on a cotton warp with all-wool wefts, it is stable, low in profile and entirely reversible in feel, and it has never been walked on.