9'2" x 12' Turkish Oushak Rug | Wool | Brown and Green

A 9'2" x 12' Oushak knotted by hand in Turkey, with a 3/8" pile of wool on a rectangular format. At a glance it is a dark brown field carrying pale gold and cream flowerheads, wrapped in a broad soft green border. The drawing is large and open, with plenty of bare ground showing between motifs, which is what gives the rug its quiet look in the room photograph.

The design

The field runs as an all-over pattern rather than around a single medallion: a column of gold lozenge cartouches down the centre, each outlined in dark brown with a small flower at its heart, alternating with eight-point stars and squared blossom panels. Around them curl long serrated leaves and thin vine stems that carry palmettes, sunflower heads and small four-petal crosses, the whole repeat mirrored across the long axis. The main border sets rust and brown palmettes and rosettes on green, with a heavy scalloped flower filling each corner, and it is fenced on both sides by narrow cream guard stripes of linked blossoms and meandering vine. The outermost band returns to plain brown before the ivory fringe.

The colour

The ground is a walnut brown that shifts toward warm tobacco where the light crosses the pile, and it does most of the work here. Over it sit buttery gold and cream and beige motifs, close enough in tone to read as one family, with small leaves in a dusty green that picks up the border. Accents of rust and a deeper brick sharpen the flower centres and the corner pieces. The green of the border is soft and slightly grey, so the change from field to frame is a step in tone rather than a hard contrast.

The making

Hand-knotted in wool, with a 3/8" pile short enough that the knot rows are visible on the surface in the close photographs and clearly so on the folded-back corner. The foundation photographs show an even, moderately coarse weave with the pattern legible from the reverse. It was woven in Turkey to the Oushak drawing of western Anatolia, and it is a new rug in perfect condition, with full pile and intact fringes at both ends. It is one of the many hand-knotted rugs we carry in this size.