9'3" x 11'10" Ziegler Peshawar Chobi Rug | Brown All Over Floral Field | Hand-Spun Wool, Brand New

Brown grounds are rare in hand-knotted weaving because the dye has to stay warm rather than turn muddy, and this one holds its warmth beautifully. The 9'3" x 11'10" field reads as a deep cocoa with faint horizontal abrash, and the hand-spun wool carries enough sheen that the color shifts between milk chocolate and near black as you walk around it. It is a brand new piece, never laid in a home, with thick even pile, tight selvages and clean ivory fringe at both ends. As a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug, it ships with our certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction, and it lands squarely in the most useful of all room dimensions, which is why it sits alongside our other 9x12 rugs.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a classic Ziegler Chobi all over floral layout with no medallion, so the pattern repeats calmly from edge to edge and can be cropped by furniture without losing its logic. Large open palmettes and shaded rosettes sit on a thin ivory vine that loops through the field, joined by serrated leaves, small 5 petal blossoms and a scattering of boteh shapes with dark brown outlines, one of which appears in close detail on the pile photograph. The scale is generous and slightly relaxed, in the Ziegler manner, with more empty brown ground between motifs than a traditional city rug would allow. Framing it are 5 bands: a wide golden beige main border carrying alternating palmettes and curling cloud bands, two narrow floral guard stripes on each side, and a plain brown outer stripe that ties the border back to the field.

Chocolate Brown Field, Golden Beige Border, Sage and Salmon Accents

The palette is entirely earth toned and reads warm in lamplight. The field is a deep chocolate brown with soft striation from the hand-spun yarn, and against it the flowers come through in wheat, straw gold, buttery cream and pale ivory, several of them shaded from one tone to the next within a single blossom. Soft salmon and dusty rose appear in the hearts of the larger palmettes and again as small flecks along the border vine, while a quiet sage green shows in the leaf tips and inside a few rosettes, visible in the border close-up rather than from across the room. The main border is a golden beige that turns nearly honey where the light catches the pile, outlined throughout in the same dark brown as the field so the two halves of the rug never separate visually. Ivory fringe and a brown selvage finish the edges.

Woven in Peshawar in the Ziegler Chobi Tradition

Peshawar in northwest Pakistan is where the Ziegler revival is woven today, by weavers working from the 19th century Ziegler design archive on upright looms with hand-spun, hand-carded wool. Chobi means wood, a reference to the plant and vegetable dye recipes that give these rugs their muted, already mellow color instead of the hard brightness of chemical dyes. The wool here is spun slightly unevenly on purpose, which is exactly what creates the gentle abrash across the brown ground, and it is then knotted on a cotton foundation and given a light wash that softens the handle. Turn the corner over and the back shows a legible, even grid of knots with the pattern fully articulated, the mark of a careful weave rather than a fast one. Construction is sturdy, medium pile and built for daily traffic, which is what has made Peshawar the leading source of good contemporary hand-knotted work at this size.