Ziegler Rugs

Ziegler is two different things wearing one name. The first is a nineteenth century commercial operation that had carpets woven in the Sultanabad district of Persia for European and American rooms. The second is a design, woven today in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that borrows the look of those carpets. Both get called Ziegler. Only one of them is antique.

Two rugs, one name

Almost every confusion about this type comes from a single word covering two unrelated objects. An antique Ziegler is a Persian carpet from the Sultanabad district, woven under a European firm's direction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A modern Ziegler is a new rug, most often from Pakistan or Afghanistan, woven to look like one. Neither description is dishonest as long as it is stated. Anything offered simply as a Ziegler, with no period and no origin attached, is worth a direct question.

What the firm actually did

Ziegler and Co was a Manchester trading house with Swiss roots that set up carpet production in Sultanabad, the town now called Arak, in the early 1880s. The arrangement was unusual for its time. Rather than buying whatever came off village looms, the firm supplied designs and, by most accounts, dyed yarn, and had carpets woven to specification by weavers across the district. The designs were adapted for western rooms: larger in scale, more open, softer in colour than the Persian domestic taste of the period. This was one of the first sustained attempts to weave a Persian carpet for a customer who had never been to Persia.

The antique Sultanabad

What that produced is a recognisable carpet. The field is an all-over design, usually a large-scale vine with broad palmettes and sprays of leaves, drawn loosely with plenty of ground showing through. There is often no medallion at all. The palette is soft: ivory and sand grounds, muted gold, faded terracotta, dull blue-green, brown. The knot is moderate on a cotton foundation, and the pile has usually worn low, which suits the drawing. The same district later produced the Sarouk for the American trade, off the same looms and from the same wool, which is a useful reminder that a district weaves what it is asked for.

The modern revival

From the late twentieth century onward the look was revived commercially, principally in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and it is now one of the most widely woven decorative designs anywhere. Handspun yarn, plant dyes and a deliberate wash to knock the brightness back are standard, and the rugs are sold as Ziegler, as Ziegler Chobi, or simply as Chobi, the word used for the vegetable-dyed weaving of that region. A good one is a genuinely well-made hand-knotted rug. It is not a Persian carpet and it is not old, and any description that blurs those two points is blurring them deliberately.

Handspun yarn and its habits

Handspun wool is uneven by nature, and that unevenness is exactly why the colour moves across the field instead of sitting flat. It is also why a new Ziegler sheds. Loosely spun yarn releases loose fibre for the first months of a rug's life, more than a tightly spun city weave does, and that is normal rather than a defect. The pile is usually medium in length and moderate in density, so the rug compresses under heavy furniture and takes a while to come back. The pale grounds that make the design work are also the grounds that show everything, which is the trade-off the design makes in exchange for fitting into a light room.

Where it works, and where it does not

An all-over field with no medallion is forgiving of furniture, because there is no centre to cover up, and that makes the design a sound choice for large and 12x18 rooms where a sofa will always sit on part of the rug. It suits the transitional end of furnishing better than the strictly formal end. What it is not is a hard-wearing rug for a front hall: a pale ground and a soft medium pile are the wrong combination for grit. For that job the blunt, dense weaves are the honest answer. And anyone buying a Ziegler for its age should be certain which of the two rugs is in front of them, because a pre-1970 piece and a current one share a name and very little else.