2'6" x 19'7" Pakistani Bokhara Runner | Wool | Beige and Brown

This is a 2'6" x 19'7" wool runner knotted in Pakistan, thirty inches wide and just under twenty feet long, which puts it in the length a long corridor or a gallery landing asks for and most stock sizes do not reach. The ground is a warm beige that photographs close to light salmon under the workshop lights, and down the middle of it runs a single file of octagonal medallions outlined in near-black. Borders of stacked narrow stripes run the full length on both sides, and both ends finish in a banded panel and an ivory fringe.

Design

The field carries one column of guls, the flattened octagons of the Bokhara repertoire, each quartered around a small dark lozenge and filled with hooked arms in apricot, ivory and grey-green. Because the runner is only thirty inches wide there is room for one gul across rather than the usual two or three, so the pattern reads as a chain rather than a grid. Between the medallions sit small arrowhead and candelabra figures in pale blue and black, set in the open beige. The main border is a line of eight-pointed star rosettes on an ivory ground, flanked by several guard stripes of diamonds and dots, and at each end a wider panel of diagonal lattice bands in rose, slate and black closes the composition before the fringe.

Colour

The field is a soft beige that warms toward pink where the pile lies one way and cools toward sand where it lies the other, visible as broad bands along the length in the full-length photographs. Against it the gul outlines read as black, with the fills in apricot, ivory and a muted brown. The borders carry more colour than the field does: rose-red rosettes, small slate blue hooks and orange centres, all small enough that from standing height the runner still reads as a neutral.

Making

It is hand-knotted work with a soft wool pile on a cotton foundation, the back showing a clear, even knot grid and the weave running straight along the whole length. The rug is new and listed in perfect condition, with full pile, intact selvedges and plain ivory fringes at both ends.