8' x 10' Bokhara Oriental Rug | Beige Field, Elephant Foot Guls | New, Never Used

This is a classic Bokhara in the quietest colorway it comes in: a soft beige field carrying 11 vertical columns of elephant foot guls in golden brown and black, framed by 6 concentric borders of diamond lattice and small rosettes. It measures 8' x 10', one of the most useful footprints in the house, and sits naturally with other 8x10 Oriental rugs under a sofa group or a 6 seat table. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, clipped low and even so the drawing of each gul stays crisp, and the back photograph shows the tight, regular knotting and the original hand knotted label. The rug is brand new and has never been on a floor. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is 100% hand-knotted, along with its size, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all over repeat of the gul, the rounded octagon quartered into 4 panels that collectors call the elephant foot. Each gul is outlined in black, filled with small stepped hooks and dots, and separated from its neighbors by slim candelabra style motifs that run between the columns and give the field a vertical rhythm rather than a static grid. The layout has no medallion and no open corner, which is exactly why this design reads as calm from across a room and detailed up close. The border system does the heavy lifting: a wide main band of diamond lattice flanked by narrow reciprocal guard stripes, a running rosette band on the inner edge, and a plain beige outer field that stops the pattern cleanly before the flat woven ends. The whole drawing belongs to the Turkmen weaving vocabulary, so it shares its grammar with other tribal geometric rug designs while being far more finely and evenly executed than most village work.

A Beige, Brown and Black Palette

The ground is a warm beige that leans toward ivory in the open areas between the guls and toward a light camel tone where the wool catches the light, visible in the corner and fold photographs. Inside the guls the fill is a soft golden brown, closer to honey than to rust, and the outlines, hooks and tiny crosses are a deep charcoal black that supplies all of the contrast in the rug. The border lattice repeats the same 3 tones: black lines, cream ground, golden brown diamond centers, with the lightest cream used for the small dotted guard stripes so the bands separate cleanly. There is no red and no blue anywhere in this piece, which makes it unusually easy to place in rooms built on wood, stone, linen and leather. The wool has a natural low sheen, so the beige shifts between a cooler oatmeal and a warmer sand depending on the direction you walk around it, and the flat woven ends and cotton fringe stay bright ivory against the pile.

Bokhara Weaving in Pakistan

Bokhara takes its name from the old Central Asian market city where Turkmen tribal weavings were traded, and the design was carried south by weaving families who settled in Pakistan, where it has been produced on upright looms for generations. Pakistani workshops built their reputation on this one pattern: a dense double knot, a clipped low pile and a knot count well above ordinary commercial work, which is what keeps the small hooks inside each gul legible instead of blurred. Because the design is woven from memory rather than redrawn each time, the columns stay plumb and the borders meet correctly at all 4 corners, as they do here. As an Oriental rug rather than a Persian one, it is judged on weave quality and wool, and this example delivers both: springy, resilient fleece with enough body to stand up to traffic in an 8' x 10' floor plan, on a cotton foundation that will keep it flat and square for decades.