8'9" x 12' Aubusson Flat Weave Rug | Dusty Rose & Ivory Floral Medallion | Brand New, Never Used

This 8'9" x 12' Aubusson is a flat weave, meaning there is no pile at all: the wool is woven into the cotton foundation so the drawing sits flush with the surface like a tapestry laid on the floor. The whole composition is worked in soft dusty rose, ivory and gold, with a scalloped ivory center panel, a single rosette medallion and garlands of roses drifting toward the corners. Because it carries no pile, it lies very low, slips under doors and furniture legs without a fight, and shows the drawing with unusual clarity. It is brand new and never used, and as with every handmade rug we import, it ships with a certificate of authenticity. If you are weighing the difference between this and a knotted piece, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from an Oriental rug covers the ground clearly.

Design and Motifs

The layout follows the classic Aubusson cartoon. At the center sits a round rosette medallion, a stylized acanthus flower with 4 pale blue rays crossing behind it, ringed by a thin gold band and a delicate wreath of leaves. Around that wreath, long rose colored ribbons loop and fall in swags, tied into bows and threaded through garlands of open roses, peonies and small cream blossoms. A scalloped ivory panel with a gold outline holds the whole center group and separates it from the dusty rose ground. Each of the 4 corners carries a half round reserve filled with a blue plumed helmet or a trophy of musical and garden implements bound with ribbon, a neoclassical touch straight out of the 18th century French repertoire. Top and bottom center, a footed blue urn spills a full bouquet across the rose field. The outer border is an ivory band of trailing ribbon and flowering vine, finished with a plain caramel gold outer stripe. In a standard 9 x 12 area rug size, the medallion sits well clear of a sofa front and the corner reserves stay visible.

The Dusty Rose and Ivory Palette

Color is the reason to buy this piece. The ground is a warm dusty rose, closer to salmon than to pink, and it is woven with enough tonal variation that it reads soft rather than flat. The center panel and the outer border are a creamy ivory with a faint green cast, which cools the rose down and keeps the whole thing from turning sweet. Between those two fields run the caramel gold outlines, a shade or two deeper than the ivory, which do the job of drawing the eye around the composition. The flowers carry the rest: dusty pinks, coral, blush, clean cream whites and a few pale mauve blossoms, all set on sage and olive green foliage. Small accents of slate blue appear in the urns, in the helmet motifs in the corner reserves and in the rays of the central rosette, and those blues are the only truly saturated notes anywhere in the rug. The overall effect is quiet, pale and warm, the kind of palette that sits well with cream upholstery, painted furniture, walnut and brass.

Aubusson Weaving and Where This Rug Was Made

Aubusson takes its name from the town in central France where tapestry workshops wove flat floor coverings for aristocratic interiors from the 17th century onward. The technique is slow: the weaver works the wool weft back and forth in discrete color areas against a cotton warp, building the picture block by block with no pile to hide behind, so every curve of a ribbon and every petal edge has to be drawn correctly in the weave itself. This example was hand-woven in China, where workshops have specialized in Aubusson and needlepoint style flat weaves for decades and now produce some of the most carefully drawn work in that tradition anywhere. The wool is firm and tightly beaten, the selvedges are straight, and the shading in the roses shows real control over the color changes. Among hand-woven Oriental rugs, a flat weave of this scale in perfect, never used condition is a practical choice as well as a decorative one: it is light for its size, easy to move, and reversible in the sense that it lies dead flat from day one.