13'6" x 19' Chobi Peshawar Rug | Ivory All Over Floral | Hand-Knotted Wool, Brand New

This is a genuinely large piece of hand-knotted weaving, 13'6" wide by 19' long, which puts it in the small group of oversize hand-knotted rugs that can cover a great room, a long formal dining room or an open plan floor from wall to wall without a seam or a border of bare wood. It is a Chobi Peshawar, woven new in Pakistan with a wool pile on a cotton foundation, and the whole point of the piece is restraint: an ivory ground, a softly drawn all over floral, and no medallion competing for attention. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity confirming it as an authentic hand-knotted piece, along with its measurements, materials and origin. The pile is clipped low and even, so the drawing reads as tone on tone rather than high contrast, and the rug is in perfect, never used condition.

Design and Motifs

The field is a classic all over floral composition in the Ziegler manner: a lattice of thin scrolling vines that swells into broad serrated palmettes, open rosettes, curled acanthus leaves and small 5 petal blossoms scattered between the stems. The drawing is deliberately loose and slightly irregular, the way village looms draw it, so the repeat never feels printed. Close in, as in the detail photograph, you can see paired leaves flanking each palmette and small stepped rosettes marking the intersections of the vine. Four spandrel style corner pieces anchor the field, each one filled with a large leafy palmette sprig, and the main border carries an alternating run of palmettes and rosettes linked by a continuous vine. Two narrow guard stripes on each side of the main border repeat a simple 4 petal flower and meander, and a slim outer stripe finishes the edge. The selvages are neatly overcast and the ends are finished with a short, clean fringe.

A Quiet Palette of Ivory, Sage Green and Brown

Color is the reason to own this rug. The ground is ivory moving toward pale cream, with faint horizontal variation in the wool that gives the surface depth instead of flatness. The vines and palmettes are drawn in soft sage green and a muted olive that shifts toward pale gold where the light hits the pile, while the larger palmettes and the corner sprigs carry a warm light brown, closer to taupe than to chocolate. The main border reads a shade cooler and greyer than the field, which is what separates the two without a hard line, and the small flowers in the guard stripes come up as clean ivory against that greyish green. There is no black, no red and no strong accent anywhere in the weave, so the rug behaves like a textile floor in the room rather than a focal point. If you are building a neutral scheme, this belongs with our beige and ivory rugs, and it sits happily with oak, limestone, linen and painted white millwork.

Peshawar Weaving and the Chobi Tradition

Peshawar, in the northwest of Pakistan, has become the center for this style of hand-knotted work, and the best contemporary Oriental rug in a muted palette now tends to come from those workshops. The name Chobi points to the wood and plant based dyes that give the palette its soft, sun faded character straight off the loom, and the wool is hand-spun, which is why the ivory ground shows that gentle striation rather than a machine flat tone. The reverse, shown against a ruler in the last photograph, is tight and regular across the full 13'6" width, with clean knot rows and no pulling or waviness in a rug of this scale, which is harder to achieve than it sounds on a loom nearly 14 feet wide. Weaving a piece this large takes a team working side by side for a long stretch, and the drawing has to stay honest from one end to the other. It does here. Oversize pieces like this ship free in all 50 states, freight and all.