8' x 10'7" Indian Traditional Rug | Wool | Green and Ivory

A hand-knotted rug from India measuring 8' x 10'7", with a wool pile and a rectangular format. The field is a soft, slightly greyed green carrying an all-over pattern of large palmettes and curling leaves, and it is framed by a broad ivory border of the same floral vocabulary. Seen from across a room the two halves read as one quiet, warm surface; up close the drawing is dense and detailed, with small flowerheads filling almost every gap between the larger forms.

The design

There is no central medallion. Instead the field repeats a staggered arrangement of crowned palmettes, split arabesque leaves and fan-shaped blossoms, each one outlined in cream and dark brown and linked by thin vine scrolls that thread between them. Small eight-petal rosettes and sprays of tiny buds sit in the spaces, so the ground is never left empty for long. The wide main border takes the same traditional repertoire at a larger scale, alternating big ivory-ground palmettes with leafy cartouches, and it is held between narrow guard stripes: a pale grey-green inner stripe of linked flowerheads and an olive outer stripe of running leaf forms that meets the plain white fringe.

The colour

The field green sits between celadon and pale olive, cooler in the open areas and warmer where gold motifs crowd it. The border is an ivory that reads closer to clotted cream under direct light. Against both, the ornament is worked in mustard and old gold, rust, mid brown and a deep bottle green, with smaller touches of wine red, dusty rose and a pale grey-lilac picking out petal tips and leaf edges. Outlines in near-black brown keep the palmettes legible where gold meets green.

The making

Hand-knotted in wool, with the fold-back photographs showing an even, close-set knot and the pattern reading clearly on the reverse. The rug is listed as new and in perfect condition, with full pile, straight selvedges and untrimmed white fringe at both ends. The design is drawn after antique models, which is how it comes to look older than it is, and it stands among the hand-knotted rugs we carry as a formal piece in a gentle palette.