8'10" x 11'8" Ziegler Peshawar Oriental Rug | Red Field All Over Floral | Hand-Knotted Wool, Brand New

This 8'10" x 11'8" Ziegler Chobi was hand-knotted in the workshops around Peshawar, where weavers have spent the last forty years rebuilding the classic Sultanabad drawing on a cotton foundation with hand-spun wool. The field is a deep tomato red, the main border a wide cream panel, and the whole surface is drawn in the relaxed, generous scale that makes a Oriental rug of this type read as calm rather than busy. At 106 by 140 inches it sits squarely in the 9x12 area rug range, which is the size most buyers need for a sofa, two chairs and a coffee table with all legs on the wool. The rug is brand new and never used, with full even pile, straight sides and hand-tied ivory fringe at both ends, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is 100% hand-knotted.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the weaver worked an all over floral design built from broad serrated acanthus leaves, curling vine scrolls and large open palmettes, with 8 petal rosettes dropped at the intersections. Look at the center of the field and you can see a soft ghost medallion suggested by 4 big lobed blossoms and a ring of curving leaves, a device the old Ziegler looms used to give a room-size rug a focal point without closing it in. The wide cream main border carries a different vocabulary: fan-shaped palmettes, small red flower clusters, leafy stems and tiny vase motifs, all resolved cleanly at the 4 corners rather than being cut off. Three narrow guard stripes in gold, sage and red separate border from field and give the edge its finished, architectural frame.

A Study in Red, Cream and Gold

The ground is a warm brick red that darkens toward the selvage and lifts to an almost coral tone where the light catches the pile, the abrash you expect from hand-spun wool taken through a soft wash. Over it the drawing is carried in gold and honey tan, with cream and ivory used for the larger blossoms and the outlining of the leaves. Sage and olive green appear inside the leaf veins and in the small rosette centers, cooling the composition down, while dusty pink shows up in the big lobed flowers at the heart of the field and again in the fan palmettes of the border. Brown and deep madder outlines hold every shape crisp. The cream border reads more beige than white in daylight, so the rug settles easily against oak floors, walnut furniture and off-white walls without the hard contrast a bright ivory ground would create.

Peshawar Weaving and the Ziegler Tradition

The Ziegler name comes from the European firm that commissioned oversized decorative rugs in Sultanabad during the 1880s, softening traditional drawing and opening up the spacing for Western rooms. Peshawar in northern Pakistan inherited that design language and, over the past few decades, became the main source of good hand-knotted work in the style. This piece shows why: the knotting is even from end to end, the back is tight and legible, the selvages are wrapped by hand and the wool is long-staple and lustrous rather than dry. Ziegler and Chobi pieces sit alongside the best hand-knotted Oriental rugs being made today, and a 9x12 in this condition, never walked on and never cut down, is a rug you buy once for the main room of the house.