17' x 19'9" Oversize Oriental Rug | Light Green & Gold Transitional Floral | Organic Wool, Never Used

This is a true mansion piece, 17 feet wide and just under 20 feet long, hand-knotted in organic wool on a cotton foundation and never put on a floor. The field is a soft light green worked with gold, ivory and brown drawing, and the whole composition is calm enough to carry a room of this scale without competing with the furniture in it. Among oversize rugs this is the size that almost never comes up in a muted palette, since most looms this wide are given bold reds and navies. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, the wool pile and the origin, and because it is a freight-weight piece it still ships free to all 50 states.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion. Instead the weaver ran a continuous all-over vine across the whole field, so the pattern repeats quietly in every direction and the rug can be turned or placed off-center without the design breaking. The vine carries large scalloped palmettes with small stepped centers, 5 petal rosettes picked out in rust red, long serrated lancet leaves that curl back on themselves, and scattered cruciform flowerheads filling the ground between the main stems. The main border is wide and set on a gold ground, alternating shield-shaped palmette cartouches with open rosettes linked by a thin brown meander, and it is flanked by narrow guard stripes of small florets and reciprocal vine. The outermost band returns to the soft green of the field, which frames the gold border and ties the edge back to the center. Corner resolution is clean on all 4 corners, the border turns without the pattern being cut short, and the plain ivory fringe is full and even.

Light Green, Gold and Brown: The Color in Detail

The open ground is a pale sage green with visible horizontal striation, the natural abrash of hand-spun wool taken from different dye lots, which gives the field movement instead of a flat printed look. Over that green the drawing is carried in two warm values: a honey gold for the palmettes and leaves, and a paler ivory cream for the highlights and the inner outlines, so each motif has depth without any hard contrast. Brown, closer to a soft cocoa than a true dark, does the outlining work and appears again in the fine meander of the main border. Rust red is used sparingly, only in the centers of the small rosettes and in a few single knots that read as pinpoints across the field, and there are cool gray-blue touches in the palmette hearts and leaf tips that keep the warm tones from going orange. The main border is the strongest color in the rug, a full camel gold, while the outer edge band drops back to the same green as the field. The overall effect is neutral and low contrast, the kind of palette that works with oak, limestone, linen and antique brass rather than fighting them.

Origin and Weaving Quality: Hand-Knotted in Pakistan

Pakistan is where a great deal of the world's serious hand-knotted transitional work is now produced, and the workshops there are among the few still willing to set up a loom wide enough for a 17 foot rug. The back, visible in the folded corner photograph, shows straight even knot rows on a cotton foundation with no pulling or waisting along the sides, which is the real test on a piece this wide, since an unstable loom shows itself immediately at scale. The pile is hand-spun organic wool, cut at a medium height and dense underfoot, with the slight irregularity in the yarn that machine-spun wool never has and that is exactly why the green field shimmers rather than sitting flat. If you want the background on how this kind of weaving relates to Persian city work, the guide on what separates a Persian from an Oriental rug is worth reading before you buy. A rug of these dimensions took a team of weavers on one loom well over a year, and it has never been used.