9'10" x 14' Oriental Rug | Black All-Over Floral Field | Hand-Knotted Wool & Silk

A black ground is the rarest choice a workshop can make on a room-size piece, because every flower has to be drawn twice as carefully to read against it. This 9'10" x 14" piece is hand-knotted with a wool pile lifted by silk highlights on a cotton foundation, and the silk is easy to spot in person: the rosettes and the curling leaves catch light while the black field stays matte and deep. Condition is excellent with no previous use, the pile stands full and even across all 14 feet, and the selvages and fringes are original and intact. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is 100% hand-knotted, along with the measurements, materials and origin recorded above. Buyers shopping 10 x 14 area rugs for a large living room or a long dining room will find this one of the more dramatic options at the size.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion. Instead the field carries a balanced all-over composition: a lattice of thin brown vines that split, curl back on themselves and carry palmettes, multi-petal rosettes, small five point blossoms and long serrated leaves. Look at the close-up photograph and the repeat becomes clear, with a single large rosette anchoring the center of each unit and paired curling sickle leaves framing it above and below, mirrored left to right. The border system runs 5 bands deep. A wide ivory main border carries alternating rosettes, cartouche-like leaf clusters and connecting tendrils, flanked on both sides by pale sage guard stripes drawn with smaller floral heads, then narrow ivory outer guards. The corners resolve cleanly, which on an all-over field of this size is a good test of the cartoon and the weaver following it.

A Black Field Read in Ivory, Sage and Rose

The ground is a true black, not a very dark navy or charcoal, and it reads almost like velvet where the pile is dense. Against it the palette is deliberately soft: cream and ivory blossoms, dusty rose and salmon pink petals, a muted teal green in the leaf tips, pale sage in the curling foliage, and touches of pale blue and butter yellow in the smaller flower heads. Vine stems are drawn in warm brown, which keeps the drawing legible without adding harsh contrast. The main border reverses the scheme entirely, running ivory and cream with the same rose, teal and sage accents plus small notes of burgundy, so the rug frames itself in light and the dark field sits inside it like a panel. In a room this means the rug grounds a space without swallowing it: pale walls, wood floors and warm metals all respond well, and the cream border keeps the piece from reading heavy.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This is a hand-knotted Chinese workshop piece made in the classical tradition, and it belongs in the broader family of the Oriental rug, a term that covers hand-knotted work from across Asia rather than one country. Chinese ateliers building for the export market adopted the curvilinear floral vocabulary of the classical city workshops and wove it at a fine, tight gauge, which is exactly what an all-over vine scroll demands: the curve of a leaf only stays smooth if the knot count supports it. The back photograph shows an even, closely packed knot line with no slack rows, straight selvages finished in black and clean hand-tied fringes. The wool takes a low, level shear that keeps the drawing crisp, and the silk passages sit slightly brighter in the pile so the flowers separate from the black without any outlining trick. For a room-size rug meant to be walked on daily, that combination of fine drawing and durable wool pile is the practical argument for this piece.