9' x 12'10" Indian Oriental Rug | Gold All-Over Tabriz Floral Design | Wool with Silk, New and Never Used

This is a large, quietly luxurious hand-knotted Oriental rug woven in India in fine wool with a touch of silk, drawn in the classical Tabriz floral manner across a warm neutral gold field. At 9' x 12'10" it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat dining table with room to pull the chairs back, and it sits comfortably in the same footprint as most 9x12 Oriental rugs. The pile is dense and still full height, the fringe is untrimmed and even, and the rug has never been on a floor. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is hand-knotted, along with its origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field carries no medallion. Instead a continuous lattice of hairline vines travels corner to corner, carrying large fan-shaped palmettes, split leaf blossoms, 8 petal rosettes, tulip sprays and small budding stems that fill every open inch without crowding. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, which is the mark of a cartoon-based Tabriz floral layout rather than a village geometric one, and the repeat is staggered so the eye never locks onto a grid. Three borders frame the field: a narrow outer gold band, a broad ivory main border set with alternating gold and soft green cartouche rosettes joined by flowering vine, and an inner champagne green guard stripe filled with a running ribbon scroll and small carnation clusters. The corners resolve cleanly, with the main border medallions turning the corner in full rather than being cut, which tells you the weaver followed a properly resolved cartoon from start to finish.

A Neutral Gold Palette with Silk Catching the Light

The ground is a warm neutral gold, closer to dry wheat and antique champagne than to yellow, and it shifts noticeably with the nap: luminous and almost honeyed from one end, deeper and more bronzed from the other. Against it the ornament is drawn in soft rust, cinnamon brown, sage and olive green, dusty rose, pale pink and small points of teal and deep indigo that keep the palette from going flat. The main border lightens to a pale beige and ivory, with the cartouche rosettes filled in old gold and muted green, while the guard stripes read as a cool champagne green that cools the whole composition down. The silk is used sparingly, in the vine tracery and in the highlights of the larger palmettes, so those lines flash brighter than the wool around them as you walk past. It is a genuinely neutral rug that still has color in it, which is exactly what makes a 9x13 in this palette so easy to decorate around.

Woven in India to a Classical Standard

India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and this piece shows why. The workshops that weave classical floral designs for the export trade work from full-scale cartoons, use cotton warp and weft for a flat, stable structure, and knot in fine spun wool blended with silk for the highlights. The back shown in the photographs is tight and even, the knot nodes are small and regular, and the selvedges are hand-overcast in gold wool with no slack or waving along the length. On a rug this size that consistency is the hard part: a 9' x 12'10" floor takes months on the loom, and the weave has to hold the same tension from the first row to the last for the borders to stay square. This one did, and it has come to us new and unused.