8' x 10' Gabbeh Wool Rug | Solid Green Field, Tribal Motifs | Brand New, Never Used

Gabbeh weaving is the quiet end of the hand-knotted world: one color, a lot of it, and only a handful of small figures to break the surface. This 8' x 10' example is knot for knot handmade in wool on a cotton foundation, with a long lustrous pile that catches light in bands and gives the green field a living, slightly irregular surface. It has never been on a floor, the ends and sides are sound, and the pile is full and even edge to edge. As a brand new piece in one of the most usable sizes we carry, it sits comfortably among our 8x10 rugs and reads as a solid-color foundation layer rather than a pattern statement. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is 100% hand-knotted wool.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion, no spandrel and no formal border here, which is exactly the point of the Gabbeh idiom. Instead a single thin dotted line in soft orange runs around the field like a drawn-in frame, set well inside the edge, with each dot knotted individually so the line wobbles the way a hand-drawn line should. Inside and along that line sit the scattered figures: small ivory cypress trees in a loose row, paired arrowheads and chevrons in apricot and rust, a tall orange zigzag at two opposite ends, little crimson tree sprigs, and two tiny gridded squares in deep red that function almost like a weaver's punctuation mark. Count them and you are looking at fewer than 30 marks across 80 square feet of surface, which keeps the rug reading as a textured solid from a standing position and only reveals the drawing when you are close to it. That restraint is why this design works under furniture, over a large dining table footprint, or layered against patterned upholstery, and why it belongs with our modern and contemporary hand-knotted rugs rather than with classical formal designs.

The Green: Forest, Olive and Abrash

The field is a deep saturated green, closest to forest or hunter green at full daylight, cooling toward a grayed olive and faintly sage tone where the light rakes across the pile. Because the wool is handspun and dyed in batches, the color arrives in vertical and horizontal striations: paler moss-toned streaks drift through darker evergreen passages, and the whole surface shifts as you walk around it, lighter when you look with the nap and considerably darker when you look against it. The accents are deliberately few and warm: chalky ivory for the trees, apricot and rust orange for the dotted line and zigzags, and two notes of cool crimson red. Against walls in cream, bone, warm white, camel or walnut this green turns quite rich, and it does not fight brown leather or dark wood the way a blue field can. If this tone is the direction you are working in, the rest of our green rugs make the comparison easy.

Made in India: Loom and Weaving Quality

This rug was hand-knotted in India, and that is a point in its favor rather than a compromise: India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, with workshops running cotton warps on vertical looms and knotting wool pile by hand exactly as the older traditions do. The back, visible in the final photograph, shows clean even rows, a straight bound selvedge and a tight regular knot structure with no sign of machine backing or glue, which is the practical test of a genuine Oriental rug against a tufted imitation. The pile is left long for a Gabbeh, which is what gives the piece its softness underfoot and its light-catching surface, and the dense wool means it takes traffic well in a living space, a dining room or a sizable bedroom. Handspun wool, hand-knotted construction and hand-drawn motifs are why no second rug will have these marks in exactly these places.