9'10" x 14' Chinese Art Deco Rug | Golden Tan Field, Black Border | Pagoda Medallion

This 9'10" x 14' Chinese Art Deco rug is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and built on the most confident idea in Chinese Deco weaving: leave the field open and let a single small scene carry the whole room. The golden tan ground runs unbroken from one end to the other, interrupted only by a pagoda and blossoming branch at the center and by sprays of coral flowers set into the 4 corners of a wide black border. It is a rare thing in a large Oriental rug, which usually fills every inch, and it is the reason these pieces sit so easily under modern furniture. Buyers looking at 10x14 area rugs will find that this one covers a large room without visually crowding it. Condition is excellent, the wool still has body and luster, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a small pictorial vignette rather than a medallion: a tiered pagoda with a coral roof standing on a rocky outcrop, with a gnarled tree curving up behind it and carrying clusters of red, black and rust blossom. It reads almost like a painted seal dropped onto an empty page. The 4 corners of the field carry matching sprays of 5 petal blossoms on thin stems with sage and grey green leaves, drawn loosely and asymmetrically in the Deco manner instead of mirrored exactly. The black border is plain, wide and completely undecorated except where 2 of those blossom sprays spill from the field across onto the dark ground, a device that ties the 2 zones together. There is no guard stripe, no repeating vine, no herati fill. The drawing is sparse on purpose, and the empty ground is as much a part of the composition as the motifs are.

Golden Tan Ground Against a Deep Black Border

The field is a warm golden tan, closer to camel or dry wheat than to beige, and it shifts noticeably with the light: paler and almost ivory where the pile lies away from you, deeper and more honeyed where it lies toward you. That natural abrash of the wool keeps such a large open ground from looking flat or printed. Framing it is a broad border of true black with a faint charcoal cast where the pile catches the light, and the contrast between the 2 is the whole visual engine of the rug. The accents are few and deliberate: coral and salmon blossoms, a softer peach on the pagoda roof, sage and grey green foliage, small touches of rust, black and dull red in the flowering branch, and a slate grey in the rockwork. Ivory fringe finishes both ends. For a room working in warm neutrals, black metal and dark wood, the palette is already halfway there.

Chinese Art Deco Weaving

Chinese Art Deco rugs came out of the coastal and northern Chinese workshops that were weaving for Western interiors, and they broke sharply with classical Oriental convention: open grounds, plain borders, off center scenes and a palette of golds, blacks and corals that suited the Deco rooms they were made for. This piece works squarely in that tradition. It is hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a thick, evenly clipped wool pile, and the reverse shown in the photographs reads the design cleanly through to the back, which is the honest test of a hand-knotted rug. The wool is heavy and springy underfoot, the kind of pile that takes furniture and traffic in a large room without flattening, and at 9'10" x 14' the weave holds straight and square across the full width.