7'11" x 9'11" Oriental Rug | Black All-Over Floral Tabriz Design | Burgundy Border, Fine Wool Pile

A black ground is the hardest field color to draw on, because every stem and every petal has to carry its own light, and this hand-knotted Oriental rug pulls it off across the full 7'11" x 9'11" surface. The wool pile is tightly packed on a cotton foundation, the drawing is curvilinear rather than village-angular, and the scale suits the standard 8 x 10 room size without the pattern feeling crowded. Condition is perfect, with full pile, straight sides and clean hand-tied ivory fringe at both ends. Every rug we ship, including this one, comes with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is 100% hand-knotted.

Design and Motifs

The field is a mirrored all-over floral lattice in the Tabriz manner: thin rose-toned vines climb the length of the rug, split, and terminate in large open rosettes, lotus palmettes and serrated leaves. There is no medallion, so the eye reads the whole field as one continuous garden, and the repeat is balanced left to right and top to bottom rather than randomly scattered. Small buds, 4 petal blossoms and curling leaf tips fill the negative space between the larger flowerheads, which is where the weaver's knot count shows itself. The main burgundy border carries a formal procession of palmettes and blooming vine, flanked on both sides by slate blue guard stripes of alternating rosettes and a narrow ivory meander. The scalloped inner edge of the field, visible along the top and bottom in the full views, is a nice touch of finish work that cheaper copies of this pattern usually skip.

The Black and Burgundy Color Story

The ground is a deep, even black with no abrash, which throws the floral work forward in high contrast. Against it the weaver worked a warm palette: dusty rose and salmon in the vine tracery, cream and ivory in the rosette centers, sand and soft gold in the palmettes, olive and gray green in the leaves, with pinpoints of brick red and a cool slate blue that keeps the whole thing from going too warm. The main border shifts to a deep wine burgundy, dark enough to sit comfortably next to the black field but clearly separate from it, and the ivory and slate blue guard stripes act as the bright line between the two. In daylight the rose tones read pink and the golds read champagne; under lamplight the burgundy deepens and the ivory motifs stand out like embroidery. It is a rug for a room with pale walls or light wood floors, exactly as shown in the showroom photographs.

Woven in China to the Tabriz Drawing

This piece was made in China, where workshop weavers have produced fine hand-knotted goods in the classic Tabriz drawing for decades, using the same asymmetric knotting on a cotton warp and weft that the pattern was designed for. Tabriz here is the name of the design, not the origin: the curved stem, the mirrored repeat and the formal palmette border all come from that workshop vocabulary, and reproducing them faithfully takes a high knot count, since a curved vine drawn coarsely turns into a staircase. Look at the back and edge photographs and you can see the evidence, a fine even grid of knots, tight selvedges, and fringe that is an extension of the warp rather than something sewn on afterward. The wool has been clipped low and glossy, which is why the floral detail stays legible at arm's length and why this rug will hold its drawing through years of use.