9' x 12'5" Black Chobi Peshawar Rug | Ziegler All Over Floral | Hand-Spun Quality Wool, Never Used

Black grounds are uncommon in hand-knotted room sizes, and this one carries the whole piece. The 9' x 12'5" field is a deep, softly varied black hung with large gold and cream palmettes, framed by a wide ivory border that lifts the drawing instead of fighting it. It is a brand new Chobi Ziegler from Peshawar, hand-knotted in quality hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation, and it is a good demonstration of what a well made modern Oriental rug looks like today. At 9' x 12'5" it runs a few inches longer than standard 9x12 area rugs, which is useful when a sofa and two chairs all need to sit fully on the pile. A certificate of authenticity ships with the rug.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field carries an all over floral design built on a slow, wide vine that loops from one end of the rug to the other, a Ziegler habit that makes a large room size read as calm rather than busy. Along that vine sit broad lobed palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, split serrated leaves that curl back on themselves, lanceolate leaf forms filled with pale blue and sage, and small squared blossom boxes that act as resting points between the bigger flowers. The drawing is deliberately loose and slightly irregular from one repeat to the next, which is how a hand-knotted piece should look. The wide ivory main border alternates a rust and olive palmette with a pair of curling leaf forms, and it is fenced on both sides by narrow gold guard stripes carrying small red flowerheads and reciprocal hooks. The corners are resolved cleanly, with the border turning without breaking the leaf sequence.

A Black Field With Beige, Gold and Rust

The ground is black, but it is a wool black rather than a printed one: look across the field in the detail photographs and you can see it shifting toward a warm brown-black in horizontal bands, the natural abrash of hand-spun yarn taking dye at slightly different rates. Against that ground the florals run through beige, cream and honey gold, with brick rust used as a fine outline inside the rosettes and palmettes so the shapes hold their edges from across a room. Olive and soft sage green appear in the leaves, and a pale light blue is used sparingly inside a few leaf cartouches and flower centers, which is what keeps the palette from going entirely warm. The main border ground is a clear ivory cream that cools toward wheat gold in the guard stripes, so the rug reads black and ivory from a distance and far more colorful up close.

Peshawar Weaving and Chobi Quality

Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, has become one of the most serious weaving centers in the world for traditional floral room sizes, and Chobi is its best known quality. The name refers to the vegetal dye process, and the recipe is what buyers are actually paying for: highland wool that is hand-carded and hand-spun rather than machine spun, dyed in small lots, knotted at a steady density on a cotton foundation, then given a long wash that settles the colors into the muted, lightly antiqued tone you see here. Hand-spun yarn takes the dye unevenly on purpose, which is what produces the abrash and the slight luster that catches the light in the pile photographs. The back shows tidy, even knotting and straight rows, the selvages are firm, and the fringe is hand tied and clean. The pile has real body underfoot, heavy enough to lie flat without curling in a 9' x 12'5" size and dense enough to take a busy household for decades.