7'10" x 8'2" Square Chobi Peshawar Rug | Ziegler All Over Floral | Beige and Gold Natural Wool

A true square is one of the hardest formats to buy well, and this one is worth the wait: 7'10" x 8'2" of hand-knotted natural wool on a cotton foundation, drawn in the open, softly faded Ziegler manner that Peshawar weavers have made their own. The field is a warm beige that carries gold and honey lights depending on how the daylight crosses the pile, and the whole design breathes rather than crowds. It is brand new and has never been on a floor, with even pile, straight sides and the slightly irregular hand-spun wool that gives the surface its subtle striation. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording size, material and origin.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The drawing is a classic all over floral lattice of large serrated palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and small quatrefoil blossoms, all strung on a thin scrolling vine that arcs across the field and turns back on itself at the ends. Big curved sickle leaves float between the flower heads and keep the spacing generous, which is exactly what a square wants: the eye finds a resting point from any of the 4 sides, so the rug reads correctly no matter which wall you enter from. The main border is wide and camel-gold, filled with alternating upright lotus palmettes and cream flower heads, each outlined in a thin brown line. Two narrow sage guard stripes fence it in, scattered with tiny burgundy squares and pale leaf ticks that act as punctuation. Close up, image 11 shows how the outlines are drawn one knot at a time, with the red contour lines giving the leaves their crisp edge against the softer ground.

The Beige, Gold and Sage Palette

The base note is a light wheat beige that shades toward honey gold through the border and toward pale cream in the open parts of the field. Against it sit muted sage greens, the coolest color in the rug, used for the guard stripes, for many of the leaves and for small cross-shaped blossoms that flicker across the ground. A soft mushroom brown handles the vine work and the shading inside the palmettes, and the only strong accent is burgundy, used sparingly in the hearts of the larger flowers and as pinhead dots along the borders. Ivory picks out the flower petals and keeps the whole thing from going flat. It is a genuinely quiet palette that works with oak, walnut, linen and warm white walls, and because there is no dominant dark tone, the rug lightens a room rather than anchoring it heavily. The abrash, or gentle horizontal variation in the ground color, is visible in the overhead photographs and is a normal and desirable trait of hand-spun, hand-dyed wool.

Woven in Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, is where much of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted weaving is now done, and the Chobi or Ziegler group is its signature product: hand-spun wool, hand-dyed in soft muted tones, knotted on cotton warps by weavers working from a cartoon and finishing a rug of this size over many months. The back, shown folded in image 9 and photographed with the tape measure in image 13, is clean and even, with clear knot definition, tight straight rows and no visible correction work, which tells you the loom tension was held properly across the full 94 inch width. The tag reads "PIX-6807, 7.10 8.2". If you are weighing this style against older city weaving, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from an Oriental rug explains where each tradition sits. This piece is decorative weaving at its most usable: soft underfoot, dense enough for daily traffic, and finished with a plain woven cotton fringe at both ends.