9'9" x 14' Oriental Rug | Kashan Design Wool and Silk | Black and Ivory All Over Floral

This is a large, formal, brand new hand-knotted Oriental rug woven in China on a cotton foundation with a wool and silk pile, drawn in the classical Kashan manner: a deep black field covered edge to edge with flowering vinework, framed by a wide ivory border. At 9'9" x 14' it is a true room-size piece, big enough to carry a dining table with the chairs pulled out or to anchor a full seating group without the furniture crowding the border. The weave is even, the drawing is symmetrical across both axes, and the silk highlights sit slightly proud of the wool so the flower heads catch light as you cross the room. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is hand-knotted, along with its size, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field has no medallion. Instead it runs an all over lattice of thin curving vines that link large lotus palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, serrated acanthus leaves and small 5 petal blossoms, with the whole arrangement mirrored left to right and top to bottom, a Kashan-school layout that keeps a rug this long from looking repetitive. The drawing is curvilinear throughout: every vine turns in a smooth arc, and the scrolling split-leaf forms curl back on themselves in the classical manner. Three borders frame the field. The wide ivory main band carries alternating palmettes and rose sprays on a meandering vine, the inner guard is a tight running flower stripe, and the outer guard repeats paired blossoms on a sand-colored ground. Look at the corner detail and you can see that the pattern is resolved properly at all 4 corners rather than simply cut off, which is the mark of a weaver working from a well-drawn cartoon.

A Black Field Read Against Ivory, Peach and Green

The ground is black with a distinct midnight blue cast, dark enough to read as near-black in a lit room and to make every flower head jump forward. Over it the palette is deliberately soft: peach, apricot, powder rose and old ivory in the palmettes, with shell pink and brick red dotting the smaller blossoms. The leaves and vines run through sage, olive and a deeper forest green, with pale grey-blue centers turning up in many of the rosettes and a touch of gold outlining the larger leaves. The border swings the whole rug to the light side, a warm ivory to cream ground with a sand-tan outer band, so the rug reads dark in the middle and bright at the edges. Where silk is used in the highlights it takes dye more brightly than wool and shifts with the viewing angle, which is why the same flower can look cream from one side of the room and pale gold from the other.

Weaving Quality and the Chinese Workshop Tradition

Chinese workshops built their modern reputation on reproducing classical Oriental cartoons at a knot count fine enough to hold a curved line, and this piece is a good example of that work: the vines never go angular, the outlines stay one knot wide, and the pile is clipped low and level so the drawing stays crisp. The back shows a tight, regular knot with the pattern legible through the cotton warp and weft, and the ends are finished with the original plied cotton fringe rather than a machine binding. Wool carries the body of the pile and takes the traffic, while silk is reserved for the highlights, which is the sensible way to build a rug of this scale that will actually live under furniture. Because 9'9" x 14' sits in the 10x14 rug class, it is one of the sizes buyers most often struggle to find in a dark ground with a light border, and it ships free anywhere in the 50 states.