9'4" x 11'10" Ziegler Chobi Rug | Brown Field, Ivory Border | Hand-Knotted Natural Wool | Brand New

A brown ground on a hand-knotted rug is rarer than it should be, and this Ziegler Chobi shows why it works: the whole floral drawing sits on a soft, slightly striated coffee brown that reads warm rather than dark under lamplight. At 9'4" x 11'10" it falls squarely into the 9x12 hand-knotted rug footprint that carries a full sofa and two chairs with all legs on, and the pile is thick, springy hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation. It has never been on a floor. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording the size, materials and origin exactly as listed above.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over floral repeat rather than a medallion layout, built from large open palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and small squared star blossoms linked by a thin ivory vine that loops across the whole surface. Look closely at image 11 and you can see the rhythm: a squared central boss flanked by two big rosettes, with serrated leaves fanning out at the diagonals. The scale is deliberately generous, so the pattern stays legible from standing height and does not turn busy across nearly 12 feet. The ivory main border carries alternating palmettes and rose-outlined hexagonal cartouches, each one with a small grey-green flower at its heart, and it is flanked by narrow camel and brown guard stripes with a running leaf and cruciform meander. The 4 corners are resolved cleanly, which is a fair test of the cartoon and the weaver following it.

A Study in Brown, Ivory and Olive

The field is a mid coffee brown with visible abrash, the gentle horizontal striation that comes from hand-spun wool taking natural dye at slightly different rates from batch to batch. Against it the drawing is worked in beige, ivory and buttery cream, with olive green picking out leaf tips and the small border flowers, soft apricot warming the palmette centers, and pale blue-grey used sparingly on leaves and rosette hearts. Thin rose-red outlines trace a few of the flower heads and the border cartouches, the single warm accent in an otherwise quiet palette. The wide ivory border lifts the whole piece and keeps the brown from reading heavy. Among brown area rugs this one is unusually flexible: it settles over oak, walnut and pale stone without fighting any of them.

Ziegler Chobi Weaving in Pakistan

Chobi comes from the word for wood, a reference to the plant and vegetable dyes these weavers use, and Ziegler names the large-scale floral design vocabulary Western importers commissioned in the late 19th century for grand rooms. Pakistan, and the Peshawar and Lahore weaving workshops in particular, is where the best of this work is done today, on hand-spun wool that keeps the irregular luster machine-spun yarn never has. The back, shown in images 4 and 14, is tight and regular, with a knot count that is high for a rug of this scale and consistent from end to end, which is the difference between a considered workshop piece and a rushed one. If you are weighing this against other traditional pieces, it helps to know exactly what the term Oriental rug covers and where a Ziegler Chobi sits within it.