13' x 16' Oversize Hand-Knotted Oriental Rug | Willow & Cypress Tree of Life | Ivory Field, Made in India

Very few rooms can take a rug this size, and very few rugs this size are drawn with this much patience. Measuring 13' x 16', this hand-knotted wool piece covers a full great room wall to wall, and instead of one large medallion it gives you an entire orchard: rank after rank of willow, cypress and flowering fruit trees marching up an ivory ground. It is one of the more useful pieces in our stock of oversize hand-knotted rugs, because the all-over field means furniture can sit anywhere on it without cutting a medallion in half. The wool pile is a full 3/8" and still has its body, the ivory has mellowed just enough to look settled rather than new, and the rug is in excellent preowned condition. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over tree of life composition, repeated in vertical columns across the full 16' length. Slim brown and gold trunks carry weeping willows drawn as tight chevron canopies in charcoal and cream, tall tapering cypress and poplar forms in camel and blue, and bare branching fruit trees whose red limbs end in tiny cross-shaped blossoms. Between them sit upright flowering shrubs in sky blue and gold, scattered 8 petal rosettes, and small orange birds tucked into the branches, which is the kind of detail a weaver adds by hand rather than copying from the cartoon. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a wide coral red main border set with a turquoise square lattice, cream and gold palmettes and paired blue rosettes, flanked by gold meandering vine stripes and narrow blue guard stripes at the outer and inner edges. Corners are resolved cleanly, and the ivory selvage and fringe finish the ends.

A Warm Ivory Field Under Coral Red

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to cream and undyed wool than to a bright white, and it shifts a little from panel to panel the way hand-spun wool does. Against it, the palette stays deliberately soft: camel and antique gold for the cypress trunks and canopies, a dusty sky blue for the shrubs and willow shadows, charcoal brown for the willow foliage, and small hits of coral red for the flowering trees and the long vertical trunks that punctuate the field. The main border is the strongest color in the rug, a coral red that photographs slightly pink in flat light and reads as a true brick red in the room, carrying pale sea green squares, turquoise rosettes and ivory palmettes. Gold and mid blue guard stripes tie the two halves of the palette together. The overall effect is light: this is a rug that brightens a large dim room rather than darkening it, and it works with oak, walnut, cream upholstery and blue or green accents alike.

Made in India: Weaving and Quality

This piece was hand-knotted in India, which is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and we say that without hedging. Indian workshops kept the loom skills, the wool supply and the vegetable dye discipline alive while other markets moved to machines, and an oversize commission like this one, roughly 208 square feet of knotting on a cotton foundation, is exactly the kind of project those workshops are set up for. The knotting is even across the full width, the drawing of the willow canopies holds its rhythm from one end to the other, and the 3/8" wool pile has the density you want under dining chairs and sofa legs. If you are weighing this against a village or city piece from another weaving tradition, our guide to what separates a Persian rug from an Oriental rug lays out the differences in plain terms.