8'8" x 11'7" Wool & Silk French Country Rug | Savonnerie Floral Medallion | Brand New

Every so often a hand-knotted rug borrows its drawing from Europe rather than the East, and this one does it with real conviction. The design follows the French Savonnerie and Aubusson tradition: a single crowned medallion, loose garden bouquets tossed across the field, and a wide black border of carved acanthus scrollwork. It is hand-knotted in wool with silk worked into the flowers and the medallion, so the highlights lift and shift as you walk past. At 8'8" x 11'7" it lands squarely in the 9x12 area rug size most dining rooms and formal living rooms are built around, with the low clipped pile that keeps chair legs moving easily. As a hand-knotted Oriental rug it ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming the size, the wool and silk pile and the country of weaving.

Design and Motifs

The field is not open ground but a continuous black lattice of interlocking hexagons and long diamonds, each cell dotted with a tiny quatrefoil, drawn tightly enough that it reads like woven parquet under the flowers. Over that trellis the weaver has laid full cabbage roses, peonies, tulips, daisies and trailing leafy vines, grouped into 4 large corner bouquets and a ring of smaller sprays that circle the center. Two of the corners hold a footed flower vase spilling blooms, and each of the 4 corners is anchored by a scalloped shell and scroll cartouche in salmon. The medallion itself is a lobed oval filled with carved acanthus leaves and a small rosette center, outlined with a beaded black and ivory rope. The border does the heavy lifting on formality: a broad black ground carrying a continuous ribbon of gold acanthus scrolls, fleur finials and pendant flower chains, framed inside and out by narrow salmon guard stripes with a repeating leaf tip.

A Burgundy and Salmon Palette

The ground colour is a deep burgundy that warms toward terracotta where the light catches the pile, and the black lattice printed over it darkens the field into something closer to aubergine when seen from across a room. Against that depth the flowers read bright: salmon and apricot in the larger roses, powder pink and blush in the smaller buds, cream and ivory in the open blossoms, with muted sage and olive green reserved almost entirely for the foliage. The medallion is the lightest note in the rug, a clear peach salmon shaded with ivory tracery, and the same salmon repeats in the corner shells and the guard stripes so the eye keeps circling. Gold and antique ivory carry the border scrolls, and small touches of soft blue grey appear in a few leaves and daisy centers. The silk sits in the petals and the medallion, which is why those areas look almost wet in raking light while the wool ground stays matte.

Weaving Quality and Origin

This rug was hand-knotted in Pakistan, where the workshop weaving centers have spent generations producing fine European pattern work for the American and British trade, and where the standard of drawing on a piece like this one is high. The back photograph tells the story: even, tight rows of knots on a cotton foundation, the lattice and the flower outlines fully legible from the reverse, and clean selvedges with hand-tied cotton fringe at both ends. A design this detailed, with shaded rose petals and carved acanthus in the medallion, only resolves at a high knot count, because each petal needs several colour changes across a few knots to hold its shape. The pile is clipped low, which sharpens the outlines and makes the silk highlights sit flush with the wool rather than fuzzing over them. It is a brand new piece with full pile depth, so a buyer gets the entire life of the rug ahead of them.