9'2" x 12' Chinese Savonnerie Rug | French Burgundy Medallion | Hand-Carved Wool, Never Used

This is a full French Savonnerie composition worked in hand-knotted wool: a deep burgundy field, a huge crowned medallion drawn in pastel scrollwork, and a blush lattice frame that behaves like a painted room border. At 9'2" x 12' it covers a formal dining table or anchors a large seating group without the pattern ever feeling crowded, and the drawing stays symmetrical from corner to corner. The pile is thick and the outlines are hand-carved, so the flowers and acanthus leaves stand slightly proud of the ground and pick up light as you walk past. It has never been on a floor, the ends and sides are sound, and the ivory cotton fringe is untouched. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity recording the size, material, weave and origin.

Design and Motifs

The center is a layered rosette: a sage green disc holding an 8 petal flower and crossed ruby beads, ringed by cream acanthus, then by 4 gold cartouches, then by a garland of open roses and buds. Around that the medallion opens into broad rococo leaves in lilac, blush and celadon, the kind of volute drawing the Savonnerie workshops borrowed from carved plasterwork. The burgundy field is left mostly bare so the medallion reads cleanly, with loose flower sprays and single scrolls floating at each of the 4 quarters. A blush pink lattice of tiny triangles forms the wide inner frame, broken at each corner by a shield holding a pale green cartouche, and the outer guard is a striped ivory band of hanging leaf drops. One small woven cartouche sits in that outer band, the workshop's own mark, visible in the border close-ups.

A Burgundy Ground Under Cream, Gold and Sage

The field is a true burgundy, closer to wine than to brick, dense enough that it photographs almost black in the shadows and glows red where the light rakes across the pile. Everything laid over it is deliberately soft: cream and ivory for the leaf outlines, soft peach and blush pink for the lattice and the larger volutes, sage green for the central disc and the corner shields, and warm gold for the cartouches and the thin piping that separates one element from the next. Lilac and pale sky blue appear in the small leaf tips and give the pastels their coolness so the whole thing never turns sweet. The two-tone effect is the point of a Savonnerie: a saturated ground and a chalky, plaster-toned pattern, which is why this palette sits happily with mahogany, gilt frames, cream upholstery and dark hardwood alike.

Woven in China in the French Savonnerie Tradition

The Savonnerie name comes from the royal French manufactory that supplied the palaces of Louis XIV, and the design vocabulary here, medallion, acanthus, shield corners and leaf-drop border, comes straight out of that tradition. This one was hand-knotted in China, the country that has carried the technique forward at scale for decades, on a cotton foundation with a heavy wool pile that is then sheared and hand-carved around each motif so the pattern sits in relief. The back shows a tight, even knot with no slack rows, and the selvages are wrapped firmly, which is what keeps a rug this heavy lying flat. If you are weighing it against a hand-knotted Oriental rug in a more traditional idiom, compare it beside our other 9x12 area rugs and judge the drawing, the carving and the pile depth in person.