8' x 11' Jaldar Bokhara Oriental Rug | Silky Wool Diamond Gul Lattice | Brand New, Never Used

This piece measures 8' x 11', the size that sits under a full sofa grouping with the front legs of the chairs on the rug, or under a 6 seat table with pull-out room on all 4 sides. What sets it apart from most 8x11 area rugs in this price range is the handle: the pile is a soft, silky wool with a genuine sheen, so the antique red field shifts between bright cherry and deep oxblood depending on which way the nap is brushed. The drawing is Jaldar, a tight diamond lattice of guls covering the field edge to edge, framed by 7 stacked border bands. It is brand new, never walked on, and ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted Oriental rug rather than a power-loomed reproduction.

Design and Motifs

Jaldar means lattice, and that is exactly what the weaver laid out: fine ivory and sage lines cross the field into a net of diamonds, with a gul set inside each one. The guls alternate by row, squared cells quartered by a stepped cross in one row, then rounded octagonal guls with serrated crowns and small pendant drops in the next, so the eye keeps moving across the surface instead of settling in one place. Between the diamonds sit small peach and sage triangles and clusters of 4 petal crosslets, the filler elements that give this geometric all over design its density. The border system runs 7 bands deep: narrow reciprocal guard stripes, a wide band of hooked and starred cartouches, and an outer band of pale peach palmettes on an ivory ground, the one place the palette lightens. A small woven cartouche with dark script sits in one end border, the weaver's own mark, tucked into the band rather than displayed.

Antique Red, Sage and Ivory: Reading the Palette

The ground is an antique red, a true blue-leaning red rather than orange, and because the wool is so lustrous it photographs lighter where light rakes across the pile and almost black-red in the shadowed passages. Every motif is outlined in a dense charcoal black, which is what keeps the lattice crisp against that much red. Inside the outlines the weaver worked in a soft sage green that reads as a cool gray from standing height and only resolves into green when you kneel down to it, plus clean ivory, a warm peach, and a muted taupe brown through the outer palmette band. The fringe is natural undyed ivory cotton at both ends. In a room with cream upholstery and oak flooring, as in the styled photograph, the red carries the whole scheme and the sage pulls toward anything green in the furniture.

Woven in Pakistan: the Jaldar Bokhara Tradition

The gul repeat is Turkmen in origin, a design family that reached the market through the old trading city of Bokhara and gave the type its name. Today the finest work in this idiom comes out of Pakistan's weaving centers, where workshops knot it on cotton warps in high-count wool and hold the lattice dead straight across a 96" width, which is the real test on an all over field like this one. You can see the quality in the detail: the crosslets inside each gul are only a few knots across yet still read cleanly, the outlines never wobble, and the borders turn the 4 corners without the pattern being crushed or stretched to fit. Combined with the silky wool and the medium, evenly sheared pile, this is a piece built to be lived on, and at 8' x 11' it is sized for the main room of the house.