8'10" x 11'8" Chobi Peshawar Rug | Black Field with Ivory Floral Border | Hand-Knotted Wool

A hand-knotted Oriental rug in the Chobi Peshawar manner, this piece measures 8'10" x 11'8" and pairs a near-black ground with a wide ivory border, which is an unusually confident combination for a floral weave of this type. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, clipped at a medium height so the drawing stays crisp without losing the softness underfoot that Peshawar wool is known for. Condition is excellent, with full even pile, straight sides and clean ivory ends, and the back shown in the final photo gives an honest look at the knotting and the black and ivory end finish. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted, along with its size, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field carries an all-over floral design built on a lattice of thin scrolling vines that run from one end of the rug to the other. Large lobed palmettes and serrated-edge blossoms sit at the main intersections, with a single 8 petal rosette holding the exact center of the field and smaller buds, flower heads and curling acanthus leaves filling the ground between them. The drawing is symmetrical along the long axis but not rigidly repetitive, so each quadrant reads slightly differently as you walk around it. The wide main border is drawn on ivory with a meandering vine, paired rosettes and small cloudband-style devices, bracketed by narrow golden guard stripes, and the whole composition is closed by a plain black outer edge that pulls the eye back to the field.

A Black Ground Framed in Ivory, Beige and Sage

The ground is a deep soft black that reads closer to charcoal where the light catches the pile, never flat or inky, and the close-up photo shows the slight natural variation across it that only hand-spun wool gives. Against that darkness the flowers are worked in cream, oatmeal and pale sand, with a warmer buff and antique gold appearing in the larger palmettes and in the guard stripes. Cool sage green is used sparingly, tucked inside leaf tips and a handful of blossom centers, and there are faint peach and clay-rose touches at the heart of a few rosettes that keep the palette from going cold. The main border sits in the ivory to light beige range with golden shading toward the outer edge, so the overall effect is high contrast between field and border but very low contrast within each, which is why the rug looks graphic from across a room and quiet up close.

Peshawar Weaving and Chobi Quality

Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, is the center of the Chobi trade, and Chobi takes its name from the word for wood, a reference to the plant and vegetable dye tradition these weavers work in. The workshops there draw on classical Ziegler and Mahal style cartoons, hand-spin their wool, and wash the finished rug to settle the colors into the muted register you see here. Knotting is tight and regular, the back is clearly legible row by row, and the weight of the rug is substantial for its size, which is what allows it to lie flat and wear slowly in a busy room. At 8'10" x 11'8" it falls into the room-size class, so compare it against our other 9x12 Oriental rugs if you are working to a fixed floor plan.