13'1" x 18' Ziegler Chobi Oriental Rug | Black Field All Over Palmette Design | New, Never Used

At 13'1" x 18' this is a true floor-filling piece, one of the few oversize 13x18 rugs that keeps a single uninterrupted drawing from end to end rather than repeating a small cartoon four times over. It is hand-knotted in Afghanistan from natural hand spun wool on a cotton foundation, in the Ziegler Chobi style: a deep black ground carrying gold and camel palmettes, framed by a burgundy main border. The rug is brand new and has never been on a floor, with full even pile, straight sides and clean fringe, as the close photographs show. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The weaver ran an all over floral design up the length of the field: a column of large shield-shaped palmettes down the center axis, flanked by 8 petal star rosettes set in soft gold cartouches, serrated acanthus leaves, curled tendrils and small budding lotus flowers on a thin vine that never quite closes into a grid. The drawing is deliberately loose and slightly asymmetric, which is what separates Ziegler work from the tighter city formulas it borrows from. The main border repeats a large black palmette rosette alternating with a gold rosette and leaf spray on burgundy ground, held between a camel guard stripe with a fine green vine tracery and a plain black outer band. The 4 corners are resolved cleanly, with the border turn worked out rather than cut off, which on a rug this size takes real planning at the loom.

The Color Palette: Black, Burgundy and Antique Gold

The field is a dense black that reads almost blue-black in flat overhead light and warms toward deep brown when the pile is viewed from the low angle, an abrash effect natural to hand spun, hand dyed wool. Against it the ornament sits in a graduated range of golds: pale straw and cream in the palmette centers, honey and camel through the leafwork, and a light apricot gold in the guard stripe. The burgundy is a muted wine rather than a bright red, softened almost to rosewood in the border ground, and it reappears inside the field as small rosettes and leaf tips that pull the border color inward. Threads of sage green run through the vine detail and the guard stripe, cooling the gold and stopping the palette from turning brassy. Beige and light brown fill the outlines, and the overall effect in a room is dramatic but not loud: a dark, formal, low-contrast surface that anchors heavy furniture and reads well under both daylight and lamplight.

Chobi Weaving in Afghanistan

Chobi, sometimes sold as Chobi Peshawar, is the modern Afghan revival of the 19th century Ziegler workshop style, and it is now some of the most disciplined handwork in the trade. The wool is hand spun rather than machine spun, which gives the pile its slightly irregular take-up of dye and the depth you can see in the close photographs; the weave is a symmetrical knot on a cotton foundation, beaten firm, with a heavy body that lies flat immediately on a large floor. If you are weighing this against a city piece from another weaving center, our guide to the difference between Persian and Oriental rug production explains where each tradition sits. A 13'1" x 18' piece of this quality occupies a loom and a team of weavers for well over a year, which is why oversize Chobi rugs in a dark ground rarely come to market twice in the same drawing.