4'1" x 17'5" Chobi Peshawar Ziegler Runner Rug | Sage Green All-Over Floral | Hand-Knotted Natural Wool

This is a genuinely long piece, 17'5" of hand-knotted wool at an unusually generous 4'1" width, which puts it in the small group of runners that can carry a wide corridor or a long gallery wall without looking like a strip of trim. The drawing is the Ziegler formula: an open, softly washed sage green field with a loose all-over lattice of palmettes, rosettes and curling leaves, framed by a broad gold and ivory border. Every knot is tied by hand on a cotton foundation, the pile is natural wool, and the rug has never been used. It ships with a certificate of authenticity. Because of the length, this is the kind of runner buyers shop for when the hallway measurement already rules out anything off a standard rack, and long hallway runners in this width are not easy to find in one continuous weave.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field runs as a continuous repeat, which is exactly why the design survives a 17'5" length without looking stretched: large stepped palmettes sit on the vertical axis at regular intervals, linked by thin vine scrolls that throw off serrated lanceolate leaves, small 8 petal rosettes and budding half palmettes into the open ground between them. Look at the close-up photographs and you can see the detail work inside each motif, including small rosette centers outlined in a single line of clear rust red and pale grey-blue shading used to lift one leaf away from another. The border is built in 3 bands: a wide main band of connected palmettes and leaf sprays on gold, flanked by narrow guard stripes of running vine, with a plain sage green outer edge that repeats the field color and closes the rug cleanly at the selvage. This kind of all-over floral design also means the runner reads correctly from either end, so it can be laid in whichever direction the hall requires.

A Washed Sage Green Field with Gold, Beige and Rust

The field is a muted sage green, soft and slightly grey at the surface where the wash has taken the sharpness out of the dye, and it shifts across the length with gentle abrash, the natural lot-to-lot variation in hand-dyed yarn that keeps a large expanse of one color alive. Against that, the palmettes and vines are drawn in warm gold and honey beige that deepen toward apricot in raking light, with paler ivory used for the finer outlines. The main border is the warmest area of the rug, a full gold ground that reads almost apricot at the corners. Restrained touches of rust red appear only inside rosette centers and a few small motif outlines, no more than a few knots at a time, and small passages of soft grey and pale brown sit in the leaves. The overall effect is a quiet, neutral, earth-toned floor piece that works with oak, walnut and pale stone rather than fighting them, and the greens and golds hold their tone under warm lamplight as well as daylight.

Peshawar Weaving and Chobi Quality

Peshawar in northern Pakistan is one of the most serious weaving centers still producing this quality of work today, and the Chobi group takes its drawing from the 19th century Ziegler and Sultanabad tradition: open fields, large-scale botanical repeats and soft, washed palettes rather than saturated color. The wool here is hand-spun, which you can read in the slightly irregular knot rows visible in the close-up photographs, and hand-spun yarn is what gives a washed rug this depth instead of a flat printed look. The knotting is even across the full 17'5" run, the selvages are tight, the fringe is the continuation of the cotton warps, and the rug lies flat as woven. As a contemporary hand-knotted Oriental rug, it is built for traffic, which is what a corridor piece of this length is going to get.