9' x 25'1" Ziegler Serapi Gallery Rug | Coral Tomato All Over Floral | New, Made in India

This is a gallery-length piece at 9' x 25'1", a shape almost nobody weaves on purpose and almost nobody has in stock: 25 feet of coral tomato field running between two dark navy borders, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and never used. The drawing follows the Ziegler Serapi tradition, a large-scale all over floral repeat with big serrated leaves and open palmettes, which is exactly the right vocabulary for a rug this long because the pattern keeps unfolding rather than repeating itself into monotony. Rugs of this length live in long great rooms, galleries, wide center halls, libraries and lobbies, and buyers usually arrive here from the oversize rug and extra long runner pages after measuring twice. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, wool pile and dimensions, and as a heavy oversize piece it still ships free to all 50 states.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true all over floral design with no medallion, built from a lattice of thin vines that carry paired sickle leaves, fan-shaped palmettes and small eight petal rosettes. Look at the close-up photograph and you can see how the drawing is organized: two long curved leaves face each other around a central rosette to form a soft oval, and that unit repeats up the length of the rug, offset row by row so the eye never catches a hard grid. Between the large elements sit dozens of small filler flowers, bud sprays and comma-shaped leaflets that keep the coral ground active without crowding it. The main border is a dark navy band carrying alternating turtle palmettes and open flowerheads in gold, teal and green, separated by scrolling vine, and it is fenced on both sides by narrow ivory guard stripes with a running meander. On a 25 foot rug those guard stripes matter, because they draw two clean pale lines down the full length of the piece and give the whole composition its spine.

Coral Tomato, Inky Navy and the Full Color Range

The ground reads as coral tomato, a warm orange-leaning red with a slight brick undertone rather than the cool blue-red of a formal city rug, and it shifts subtly along the length as the light moves across the wool. Against it, the palette is unusually broad for a single-ground rug: sky blue and deep teal in the rosettes and flowerheads, olive and pistachio green in the leaves, butter gold and soft ivory in the large palmettes, with small hits of chocolate brown and rust in the tiny leaflets. The main border is a near-black inky navy, which is what gives the rug its weight and keeps the bright field from floating; the specification sheet lists that border color as black, and in the photographs it reads as a very dark blue-black. The narrow guard borders are cream to pale ivory with pale green tracery. In practice this means the rug will sit comfortably with warm woods, brass, terracotta and cream plaster, and it will pull blue and green upholstery into the room with it.

Woven in India in the Ziegler Serapi Tradition

This rug was hand-knotted in India, which is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted weaving is now done, and it is no compliment withheld to say so: the workshops there hold the standards that make an Oriental rug worth owning, from hand-spun wool and even dye lots to loom control over a 25 foot warp. The Ziegler Serapi idiom the weavers are working in comes from the large-scale village and workshop rugs that Western agents commissioned in the 19th century, softened and opened up for modern interiors: fewer elements, bigger drawing, generous breathing space around each motif. The back photograph shows an even, tightly packed knot with clear definition of every flowerhead through to the reverse and straight, disciplined selvages, which is the honest test of a long rug, since any slackness in the weave shows up as a wave or a narrowing over that much distance. The wool pile has a dense, slightly lustrous handle that will burnish rather than flatten with traffic, and the cotton foundation keeps the piece lying flat and true.