6' x 8'10" Chobi Ziegler Rug | Tan & Ivory All-Over Floral | Natural Wool, Never Used

This 6' x 8'10" Chobi Ziegler is the kind of quiet rug that does the most work in a room. The field is a soft tan, hand-knotted in natural wool on a cotton foundation, and it carries an open all-over floral drawing rather than a central medallion, so furniture can sit anywhere on it without cutting the pattern in half. The wool has that slightly waxy, hand-spun sheen you can see in the raking-light photos, and the pile is low enough to slide a chair across. It has never been on a floor, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted Oriental rug. At just under 9 feet long it sits comfortably in the 6x9 rugs range, the most useful footprint in most American homes.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a loose, village-style all-over floral layout: broad fan-shaped palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and small branching blossom sprays strung along a pale vine that wanders across the field. Nothing repeats mechanically. Compare the two close-ups and you can see the weavers varied the shading inside each palmette, so one blooms gold and sage while its neighbor leans brown and rust. Serrated leaves and tiny bud forms fill the gaps, and the tracery vine is woven only a shade or two lighter than the ground, which is why the field reads as calm from standing height and detailed up close. The ivory main border is drawn with alternating shield-shaped cartouches and upright heart-form blossoms, divided by small stepped sprigs, and it is framed on both sides by narrow guard stripes of brown rosettes on a tan ground. The outer stripe and the 4 corners are resolved cleanly, which on a border this busy is a good sign of a careful loom.

Color: Tan Field, Ivory Border, Gold and Green Accents

The ground is a warm mid tan with a faint rose cast, abrashed in soft vertical bands from the hand-spun yarn, so it shifts between a dusty clay tone and a lighter oatmeal depending on where the light falls. Against that sit old gold and buff palmettes, deep walnut brown outlines, and a soft sage green used sparingly in the leaves and in the small rosettes of the guard stripes. A thin terracotta rust line appears inside some of the blossom centers, and it is the only truly saturated note in the rug, which is exactly why it registers. The main border moves to a pale ivory and wheat, bright enough to lift the field without going white, and the outer stripe returns to a tan-brown that ties back to the ground. The fringe is natural undyed cream. Overall this is a neutral rug, friendly to oak and walnut floors, cream upholstery and gray tile alike, as the room photograph and the tile studio shots both show.

Chobi Ziegler Weaving in Pakistan

Chobi, from the word for wood, refers to the muted plant and wood-based dyes these rugs are finished with, and Ziegler names the 19th century European trading house that commissioned open floral village designs for Western rooms. Today the best of that tradition is woven around Peshawar in northern Pakistan, on cotton warps with hand-spun highland wool, knotted by weavers working from the same scaled drawings generation after generation. The back shown in image 9 is even and legible, the knot rows are straight, and the selvedges are tight, all of which point to an experienced loom rather than a production line. This is not a high knot count showpiece and it does not pretend to be. It is a sturdy, honestly made wool floor rug at a weave density that will take traffic for decades, with the kind of soft, slightly irregular palette that most machine-made imitations never get right.