10' x 16'4" Ziegler Soltanabad Rug | Royal Blue & Burgundy All Over Floral | Ghazni Wool, Never Used

This is a big room rug in the truest sense: 10 feet wide, 16'4" long, and drawn on a single ink-dark royal blue field that runs the full length without a break. The pile is Ghazni wool, hand-spun and hand-knotted, with the slight silky sheen you can see in the close-up photographs where the light crosses the palmettes. It has never been used, the ends and selvages are original and tight, and the back reads clean and even from corner to corner. Pieces this large in a Soltanabad drawing are hard to place in inventory, which is why our range of oversize hand-knotted rugs turns over quickly. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is hand-knotted, along with its materials, size and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field is a classic Soltanabad, or Ziegler, composition: an all over floral design built on a thin ivory vine lattice that carries oversized serrated palmettes, split leaves and small rosettes across the whole surface. A central column of larger forms gives the eye a place to rest, including a gold octagonal rosette anchored by 4 red petals at the very middle, with two secondary rosettes above and below it on the long axis. Large stepped cartouche shapes in gold and sage sit at each end of that column, drawn in the bold, slightly angular style that makes this pattern read well from across a room rather than only at arm's length. The main border is a wide burgundy band of rosettes, arrowhead leaves and palmettes, framed on both sides by a blue and brown checkerboard guard stripe and a gold minor border filled with small hooked motifs, and the 4 corners are resolved cleanly with no crowding.

A Royal Blue Field Against Burgundy and Gold

The ground is a deep royal blue that photographs almost black in the overhead shot and opens up to a saturated navy blue with a faint abrash in the detail images, the natural variation of hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn. Against it the drawing is carried in warm mustard gold, pale straw, ivory and a soft sage green, with sky blue leaves and small flashes of rust and tomato red used sparingly to outline the palmettes. The border reverses the balance: a true burgundy red ground with gold, green and light blue ornament, so the rug reads blue in the center and warm at the edges. Brown, cream and gold squares in the checkerboard guard stripes tie the two halves of the palette together. It is a high contrast, traditional color scheme that sits comfortably with dark wood, brass and leather, and it will not wash out under a large chandelier or a wall of windows.

Weaving Quality and Ghazni Wool

This rug was made in Pakistan, where the best contemporary workshops weave the Soltanabad repertoire to a genuinely high standard, and it is a good example of what the term Oriental rug covers today. The pile is Ghazni wool, the long-staple highland fleece prized for its lanolin content and for the way it takes dye deeply and then polishes with use, which is where the soft, silky hand in these photographs comes from. The foundation is cotton, giving a flat, stable rug that lies dead straight at this size, and the back shows a consistent knot line with the border motifs legible from the reverse. Fringes are the warps themselves, finished and secured, and the selvages are wrapped in matching navy wool. With a good pad underneath, a 10 x 16 of this construction is built to take decades of traffic in a great room or a long dining room.