9' x 11'6" Afghan Ziegler Rug | Burgundy & Gold All Over Floral | Organic Wool, Never Used

This is a hand-knotted Ziegler design Oriental rug woven in Afghanistan in natural organic wool, and it has never been on a floor. The pile is deep and glossy, the burgundy is even from selvage to selvage, and the hand-tied cotton fringe is still full at both ends. At 9' x 11'6" it sits squarely in the most useful of all room sizes, large enough to carry a full seating group or an 8 seat dining table without crowding the walls. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, the materials and the hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field carries an all over floral design, the drawing the Ziegler house style is known for: big open palmettes, lotus heads and fan shaped blossoms strung along thick curling vines that repeat in staggered rows up the length of the rug. Between the large flowers sit smaller rosettes, serrated leaves and curled tendrils that fill the ground without ever looking busy. A narrow gold minor border with a running rosette and bar motif separates the field from a wide main border of leafy palmettes and stylized cypress forms, and the 4 corners are resolved cleanly rather than cut off mid motif, which tells you the weaver worked from a properly drawn cartoon. A plain burgundy outer band frames the whole thing.

Burgundy Field, Antique Gold Border

The field is a deep wine burgundy that shifts toward oxblood where the pile lies one way and toward a lighter garnet where it lies the other, the natural abrash of good hand-spun wool. Against it the florals read in a range of warm tones rather than one flat gold: pale cream and buttermilk in the blossom centers, apricot and honey in the petals, and a darker camel brown in the vines and outlines. The wide border is a soft antique beige to old gold, the lightest value in the rug, which is what makes the burgundy look as saturated as it does. Small notes of sage green appear in the leaf tips and in the border guard stripe, cooling the whole palette just enough to keep it from going orange under lamplight.

Woven in Afghanistan, Ziegler Tradition

Afghanistan is now one of the few places still producing this weight of hand-knotted work at this standard, and the Ziegler design, named for the 19th century trading house that commissioned open floral rugs for Western rooms, is what its best workshops build their reputation on. The wool here is the point: highland fleece, hand-spun, with enough lanolin left in it that the surface holds a low sheen and resists soil. The back shown in the photos is tight and regular, knot row to knot row, on a cotton foundation, with straight sides and square ends, which is why the rug lies flat immediately. Among 9x12 area rugs this is the kind of piece that gets handed down rather than replaced.