8' x 9'2" Bokhara Rug | All-Over Gul Design on Deep Red | Hand-Knotted in Pakistan, New

This 8' x 9'2" Bokhara is a nearly square piece, hand-knotted by hand on a cotton foundation with a soft natural wool pile, and it is a good example of what a well-made contemporary Oriental rug looks like when the weaver has stayed disciplined. The drawing is exact from one end to the other, the rows of guls line up cleanly, the selvedges are tight, and the handle is heavy and supple rather than stiff. It has never been on a floor: the pile stands full, the ivory fringe is clean and even, and the condition is perfect. The squarish proportion is genuinely useful, since it fills a room that a standard 8x10 leaves looking narrow. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is hand-knotted and describing exactly what you bought.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over repeating design of guls, the quartered octagonal medallions that give the Bokhara family its name and that collectors also call the elephant foot motif. Each gul is outlined in black, divided into 4 quarters, and filled with small hooked leaves and stepped bars. Between the rows sit slim cruciform star motifs that keep the red ground from ever reading as empty. The border is where the weaver shows off: a wide main band carrying alternating ivory, teal and salmon rosette medallions, flanked by a diamond lattice guard stripe and several narrow ribbon bands of tiny repeated hooks and dots. The corners resolve correctly, which on a fully geometric layout like this is the fastest way to judge the hand behind it. A plain red outer margin finishes the piece before the hand-tied cotton fringe.

The Color Palette

The ground is a deep saturated red that photographs bright under direct light and settles toward burgundy in the corners of a room, which is exactly the behavior buyers of red and burgundy rugs are looking for. Against it the guls are drawn in soft ivory, warm salmon-peach and a muted teal green, all held together by crisp black outlining that gives the pattern its definition from across the room. Brown tones run through the shaded areas of the border bands. There is no harsh contrast anywhere in the palette, and no abrash streaking across the field, so the red reads even and continuous. On a dark hardwood floor the rug warms the whole space; against grey or charcoal walls, or with blue upholstery as in the room photograph, the red becomes the single strongest note in the room without fighting anything else.

Bokhara Weaving in Pakistan

The Bokhara design descends from the Turkoman weaving tradition of Central Asia, named for the old market city where these rugs were traded, and it is now woven at a very high standard by Pakistani workshops that have specialized in it for generations. The appeal is consistency: this is a tight, close-cropped weave with a low even pile, and the back shows small clear knots with the pattern legible thread for thread, which is the mark of a workshop rug rather than quick commercial goods. The wool is soft in the hand but resilient underfoot, and the low pile and dense knotting mean a Bokhara like this takes traffic well and vacuums clean without shedding out of shape. For a buyer who wants a new, unworn, hand-knotted rug in a classic geometric idiom at a nearly square 8' x 9'2", this is a straightforward piece to live with for decades.