9' x 11'5" Chobi Peshawar Rug | Hand-Spun Wool All Over Floral | Chocolate Brown & Ivory

This 9' x 11'5" Chobi is the kind of hand-knotted Oriental rug that decorators keep coming back for: a deep chocolate brown field, a wide ivory border, and not one loud note anywhere in it. The wool is hand-spun, so the surface breathes with fine striation rather than sitting flat and mechanical, and the pile has been clipped low in the Peshawar manner that makes the drawing crisp and the rug easy to live with under furniture. Foundation is cotton, visible in the back photograph along with the natural fringe, and the weave is even edge to edge with no wear, no repairs and no fading. Condition is excellent and never used. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted, with the size, materials and origin recorded in writing.

Design and Motifs

The field carries a classic all over floral design drawn in the Sultanabad and Ziegler idiom: large open palmettes with hooked interiors, tulip-like blossoms, and serrated leaves, all connected by a thin curling vine that wanders instead of repeating rigidly. At the center sits an 8 petal rosette with a small dark eye, flanked above and below by two upright crested palmettes, so the composition reads as a loose lattice with a quiet focal point rather than a formal medallion. Small buds, feathered leaf sprays and single hanging florets fill the ground between the big flowers and keep the brown from going empty. The main border is wide and ivory, set with alternating rosettes and leaf clusters on its own meandering vine, framed inside and out by narrow guard stripes of dotted beige. The corners are drawn to resolve properly, a detail visible in the close-up of the border, where the leaf turns to meet the field line.

A Study in Brown, Ivory and Taupe

The field is a dark coffee brown with visible abrash, the hand-spun wool shifting between espresso and a warmer walnut tone as the light crosses it, which is exactly what buyers look for in natural dyed brown rugs. Against that ground the flowers are worked in ivory, sand, oatmeal and pale gold, with several palmettes shaded in soft blue-grey and outlined in a thin dark brown that gives them definition without hard contrast. A few blossom hearts carry a faint rust or oxblood accent, small enough to register as warmth rather than color. The border is a clean cream that pales toward ivory in the center of each side, with taupe and khaki leaves and slate-grey shading inside the rosettes, and the outer edge and selvage return to the dark brown of the field to close the design. The overall effect is neutral and low contrast, a palette that works with walnut and oak floors, warm white walls, leather, linen and black metal.

Peshawar Weaving and the Chobi Tradition

Chobi rugs are woven in and around Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, where weaving families have built a reputation over the last few decades for reviving 19th century village drawing with hand-spun, plant dyed wool. The name comes from the word for wood, a reference to the natural dyestuffs behind these soft browns, creams and greens. Loom work here is done on a cotton warp with a single knot and a firm beat, then the finished rug is clipped low and washed to settle the dyes and bring up the luster of the wool. What makes a piece like this worth owning is consistency: straight sides, a flat lie, a border that turns its corners correctly, and wool with enough natural lanolin to take traffic in a 9 foot by 11 foot 5 inch room for decades. Peshawar is one of the few weaving centers still producing this scale of hand-knotted work to this standard.