8'11" x 12' Oriental Rug | Soltanabad All Over Design | Rust Red & Black | New, Never Used

This is a brand new, never used hand-knotted rug drawn on the Soltanabad pattern, with a rust red field carried corner to corner by angular vine work and a wide black border of ivory cartouches and rosettes. The wool pile is heavy and springy underfoot, the kind of handle that tells you the weavers packed the knots down rather than rushing the row, and the cotton foundation visible at the folded corner is straight and evenly spaced. At 8'11" x 12" it covers a full seating group, and because it falls into the standard 9x12 Oriental rugs slot it will sit under a sofa and chairs without crowding the walls. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming it as a genuine hand-knotted piece. If you are weighing this against a village weave from Persia, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from a broader Oriental rug is worth five minutes.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field is a true all over design, built from a lattice of thick gold vine that branches into serrated palmettes, split leaves, 8 petal rosettes and hooked cloud bands, all drawn with the straight lines and stepped shoulders of the Soltanabad school rather than the curved line of a workshop piece. Large ivory and gold shield shaped leaves anchor the repeat at intervals along the length, and between them sit small slate blue cypress sprigs, stars and crosses that fill the ground without ever cluttering it. The border system runs three deep: a wide black main band of ivory arabesque holding alternating rosettes, flanked by a tan guard stripe of tiny stylized blossoms on both the inner and outer edge, finished with a narrow rust outer line and hand-tied ivory fringe at both ends.

Rust Red, Black and Soft Sage Green

The field is a deep brick rust, a red with brown in it rather than a bright cherry, and it shifts slightly with the light so the pile reads warmer in the raking shots and darker in the overhead view. Against that ground the drawing is worked in honey gold and buttery tan for the vines, ivory for the large leaves and the border arabesque, and a muted slate blue for the sprigs and the shading inside the palmettes. The green the spec sheet notes is a soft sage, almost celadon, and it appears most clearly in the border rosette centers and in a few leaf tips on the field, where it cools the red down. The main border is a dense black that goes nearly navy in the folds, which frames the rust field hard and keeps the whole rug from reading as one warm mass. Small touches of dark brown, burgundy and a pale aqua turn up in the rosette hearts.

Made in India, Woven in the Soltanabad Tradition

This rug was hand-knotted in India, which is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced, and it shows in the discipline of the weave: even rows, square corners, selvages wrapped tight and a back with clear, regular knot nodes. The Soltanabad drawing is a decorative tradition built for exactly this kind of weave, angular enough that it does not need an extreme knot count to look right, and generous enough in scale that the pattern still reads from across a room. The wool is strong and lustrous with a long pile that will take heavy traffic for decades, and because the rug is new and never used the pile stands at full height with no shading from wear. Hand-spun character shows in the subtle variation across the red field, the mark of dye lots mixed by hand rather than machine matched.