9'10" x 13'10" Agra Rug | Haji Jalili Design | Gold Field | Brand New Wool Pile

This 9'10" x 13'10" Agra rug is a careful reproduction of the Haji Jalili drawing, hand-knotted in India in wool on a cotton foundation and never walked on. It is a large room-size piece, close to the classic 10x14 area rug footprint, and it works the way the best neutral floor pieces do: quiet from across the room, then full of drawing once you stand over it. The pile is clipped low so every outline stays crisp, the handle is supple, and the ivory fringe and selvages are clean and untouched. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed medallion built around an 8 petal ivory rosette, each petal filled with tiny paired blossoms and slim sage leaves. Above and below it, rose-toned pendant cartouches with curling arabesque hooks run out to serrated leaf finials, and the whole medallion sits inside a stepped outline that reads almost like an architectural frame. The field around it is not left empty: fine curling vine, small palmettes, single carnations and scattered blossoms cover it in an even, unhurried rhythm, with 4 corner spandrels drawn in the same vocabulary so the composition closes properly. The main border is the signature element, a procession of large dark brown boteh leaves, each one filled with little flowerheads, connected by thin brick red vine scrolls. It is flanked by narrow guard stripes of alternating rosettes and diamonds and finished with an outer band of running floral heads. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, which is the harder thing to weave well.

Warm Gold, Sage and Rust Throughout

The palette is deliberately soft and warm. The field is a honey to camel gold that shifts lighter and darker in broad horizontal bands as the hand-dyed wool changes, the kind of gentle abrash that keeps a large neutral floor from looking flat. The medallion and its petals are cream and buttery ivory, shaded with muted sage green and olive. Outlines and vine work are drawn in brick rust and a dusty brick red, with the pendants and medallion collar in a faded salmon rose that the detail photos show clearly. The boteh leaves in the main border are the darkest note in the rug, a deep chocolate brown, and the black-brown rosettes in the guard stripes give the eye something to hold at the edges. Small touches of mustard yellow, pale pink and antique ivory sit throughout the field. Against wood floors, pale plaster walls, brass or aged leather, the whole rug reads as warm gold with brown edges.

Agra Weaving Made in India

Agra, in northern India, has been a rug weaving center since the Mughal court workshops, and India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is made today. We say that with confidence: the best Indian workshops now spin their own wool, dye in small lots, and give their weavers master drawings of the caliber reproduced here, the Haji Jalili layout with its lobed medallion and boteh border. This piece shows what that discipline buys. The back photograph shows straight, even rows of knotting on a cotton foundation with no pulling at the edges and no crowding in the corners of the medallion, which is where a rushed weave always shows first. The wool is hand-spun and takes the light with a soft sheen rather than a hard shine, the pile is shorn low so the fine vine work stays legible, and the muted washed palette is achieved in the dyeing rather than by stripping color out later. At 9'10" x 13'10" it is a genuine large-room rug, brand new, and still holding its full original pile.