5' x 8' Silk Hereke Design Rug | Deep Teal Floral Medallion | Brand New, Never Used

This 5' x 8' rug is hand-knotted entirely in silk, pile and foundation both, and it behaves the way only a true silk piece does: the field changes from near black to bright peacock teal as you walk around it, and the ivory petals of the medallion flash almost white under direct light. It has never been on a floor. The pile stands full and square, the selvages are tight, the silk fringe is clean and unworn, and the back seen in image 8 shows a crisp, even knot grid with no repairs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is a genuine hand-knotted piece, and this one is a good example of how far the classic Hereke drawing can be pushed at this scale. As a hand-knotted Oriental rug, it sits at the decorative end of the market rather than the tribal end: formal, symmetrical and built around light.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a 12 petal rosette medallion, each petal filled with its own miniature scrolling ground so that no two neighbors read the same, radiating from a small multicolor floral boss in black, gold and rose. Around it the field is worked in an unbroken all-over vine, thousands of tiny flower heads and curling leaf tips drawn at a scale you can only reach with silk. Four large boteh shapes stand at the field corners, and a pair of long ivory brackets sweeps up the sides to frame a shaped cartouche at the top and bottom, a device borrowed straight from classical Hereke prayer and vase compositions. The main border runs a heavy gold arabesque over a dark ground, punctuated by rose and blush palmettes, and it is flanked by ivory guard stripes carrying small rosettes and green leaf sprigs. Image 7 shows how cleanly the border corners resolve: the drawing turns the corner without a single interrupted motif, which is the quickest test of a well drawn cartoon.

A Palette Anchored in Deep Teal

Deep teal dominates, laid over a ground so dark it reads as midnight in the close-ups, and the vine tracery is picked out in three separate blues: a pale ice blue for the outlines, a mid turquoise for the leaves, and a saturated peacock for the flower heads. That layering is what gives the field its depth rather than a flat wash of color. The medallion petals alternate soft ivory, warm champagne gold and clear turquoise, so the centerpiece lifts away from the field instead of sinking into it. Gold carries the main border arabesque and the boteh outlines, while blush pink and a deeper rose appear in the palmettes, the small border rosettes and the tiny central flower, just enough warmth to keep the cool blues from going cold. Ivory does the structural work: the guard stripes, the bracket outlines and the outer band all read cream, which is why the rug frames itself so cleanly against a dark floor. Under lamplight the whole palette warms; in daylight it goes bluer and sharper.

Hereke Drawing, Woven in China

Hereke is a design vocabulary, a court style of fine curvilinear floral work that has been copied and reinterpreted by the best silk weaving workshops for more than a century. This rug was made in China, where the finest modern silk weaving is produced on a serious scale, and the workmanship holds up to the drawing: a silk warp and weft, a very short clipped silk pile, and a knot count high enough to render single-knot outlines around each flower head, which is what you are looking at in image 4. The short pile is deliberate. It keeps the fine detail legible and gives that hard mirror sheen across the field. Pieces like this belong among the better hand-knotted silk rugs on the market: they suit low-traffic settings, a formal sitting room, a bedroom, under a desk, or mounted flat on a wall where the light can move across the silk the way it was meant to.