12' x 18' Jaipur Oriental Rug | Rust Red All Over Floral Palmette Design | New, Never Used

This is a true palace piece: 12 feet wide by 18 feet long, hand-knotted in Jaipur from lustrous wool on a cotton foundation, and never laid in a home. The rust red field carries an all over floral palmette design framed by a deep black main border, and the drawing repeats cleanly across the full 216 inch length without the shortcuts you see in commercial work at this scale. Buyers shopping oversize 12x18 rugs rarely find one this crisp and this saturated. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all over composition rather than a medallion layout, so it reads well from any side of the room and takes furniture without losing its center. Large lobed palmettes and split serrated leaves sit on a slow curving vine that loops the full width, with smaller lotus heads, cloudband scrolls and 4 petal rosettes filling the ground between them. The black main border carries its own procession of shield shaped palmettes and leafy arabesques, separated from the field by a striped guard stripe and finished with a triangle and rosette outer band. Corners are resolved properly, which is the first place a large traditional design usually falls apart.

A Rust Red Field Framed in Black and Gold

The ground is a warm rust red, closer to terracotta and brick than to a cool cherry, and the long wool gives it a copper sheen that shifts as light moves across the room. Against it the palmettes are drawn in gold and honey beige, outlined in near black, with soft sage green leaves and passages of soft brown adding depth to the larger flower heads. The main border reverses the scheme: a black ground with salmon, gold and green blossoms, so the rug frames itself and keeps the field from spreading visually. Cream and ivory highlights in the small rosettes and the outer guard bands lift the whole palette and stop the rust and black from reading heavy.

Jaipur Weaving and the Quality of the Knot

Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is one of the great workshop towns of India, and India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is now made. If you are weighing the difference between this kind of piece and a village weave, our guide to what makes an Oriental rug is worth the read. The back shows an even, tightly packed knot with clear definition on every outline, the selvedges are hand-wrapped and the fringe is a continuation of the cotton warps rather than a sewn-on addition. At 12 feet by 18 feet this weighs well over 150 pounds and would carry a freight surcharge almost anywhere else; here, like all of our oversized rugs, it ships free to all 50 states.