17'5" x 25' Turkish Oushak Rug | Ivory Field, Shrimp Border | Mansion Size, 1980s

At 17'5" x 25' this Oushak covers roughly 435 square feet, which puts it in the small group of pieces woven on a loom wide enough for a ballroom, a great hall or a two story open plan room. It was knotted in Turkey in the 1980s in the Oushak manner, with a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation and a palette held deliberately quiet: an ivory to pale gold field, a wide shrimp border and olive sage leafwork drawn through both. Weavers rarely attempt a rug at this width, because every row has to be beaten straight across more than 17 feet, and the fact that this one lies flat and square after 40 years says a great deal about the loom it came off. Handling is where the size becomes real, so we ship it free on our own trucks throughout the Northeast and free by carrier to all 50 states, never with a freight surcharge. A certificate of authenticity is issued with the rug, confirming it as a hand-knotted piece and recording its size, materials and origin. If this is your first look at oversize Oushak rugs, this one is a fair benchmark for what the category can do.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over composition rather than a single centered medallion, which is the right decision at this scale because the pattern keeps working no matter where the furniture lands. Two large leaf wreaths, drawn as open arcs of serrated shrimp colored foliage, enclose small stepped diamond medallions in taupe and brown with tiny ivory lattice fill, and each medallion throws out slender pendant arms tipped with rounded finials. Between them the weaver set broad flat palmettes, 8 petal and 10 petal rosettes, hooked leaf forms and a thin wandering vine that connects the elements without crowding them. Anchor motifs sit on the long axis: a pink sunflower rosette at the center, a fan shaped lotus at the field edge, and split leaf sprays repeating along the sides. The main border carries alternating cream daisy rosettes and dark clustered floral heads on a shrimp ground, framed by narrow guard stripes of reciprocal hooks and a running stylized vine in gold and brown. Drawing is loose and confident, with the gentle irregularity in the repeats that separates a real village loom from a printed copy.

Ivory, Shrimp and Sage: A Deliberately Quiet Palette

The field is ivory shading toward pale wheat and buttermilk, with soft abrash through the wool so that some bands read a touch warmer than others, a natural variation from dye lot to dye lot that gives a rug this wide its depth. Against it, the border is shrimp: a muted salmon pink with a faint apricot undertone, deeper where the light rakes across the pile and paler where it lies flat. Sage carries the foliage, an olive tinted green that keeps the flowers from turning sweet, and it is joined by cocoa brown and grey taupe in the palmettes and medallions, cream and bone in the rosette petals, and a warmer honey gold in the outer guard stripe and the overcast ends. There is no black, no navy and no saturated red anywhere in the rug, which is exactly why this palette works under white plaster, pale oak, limestone and linen upholstery. Colors this soft are hard to find at 17 feet wide, and they are the main reason decorators chase Oushaks for large neutral rooms.

Oushak Weaving and the Turkish Tradition

Oushak, or Usak, is a weaving town in western Anatolia that has been producing large format rugs since the 15th century, and by the late 19th century it was supplying the biggest floors in Europe and America with room size and mansion size pieces no other center could match. The tradition is built around a longer, slightly coarser wool knot on a cotton foundation, and a scale of drawing meant to be read from across the room instead of from 3 feet away. That is not a lower standard, it is a different one: the value of an Oushak sits in the wool, the natural luster it keeps after decades, the softness of the dyes and the sheer engineering of holding a 25 foot warp true. This 1980s piece follows that formula honestly, with a 3/8" pile that is still even from end to end and selvedges and ends intact. For a buyer comparing it against other traditional weaving centers, our guide on the difference between Persian and Oriental rug production explains where Turkish work fits, and you can see what else we hold in this format on our oversize rug page.