11'7" x 17'8" Hand-Knotted Oriental Agra Mansion Rug | All-Over Mughal Floral Design with Cloud-Band Cartouches | 100% Wool on Cotton Foundation | 180 KPSI

An exceptional oversized mansion piece from one of India's most prestigious weaving traditions, this 11'7" x 17'8" hand-knotted Oriental Agra rug carries forward the classical Mughal carpet idiom that has been the gold standard of Indian rug-making since the 16th century. The composition is a calm, generously scaled all-over field of large palmettes, serrated leaves, and curling cloud-band cartouches set against a soft tomato-red ground, framed by a wide antique-gold main border woven with palmette-and-vine repeats and finished with multiple narrow guard borders. The rug is hand-knotted in 100% wool on a cotton foundation at approximately 180 knots per square inch and is in excellent brand-new condition, never used, ready to anchor a great room, formal living room, grand dining room, or estate library.

Design and Motifs

The composition is a textbook Mughal-revival all-over, organized as a continuous lattice of large serrated palmettes, lotus blossoms, leafy rosettes, and curling tendrils that flow edge to edge across the soft red field with no central medallion to anchor a single focal point. Distributed symmetrically through the field are distinctive midnight-navy cloud-band cartouches, drawn in the elegant scrolling silhouette that traces directly back to Safavid Persian and Mughal Indian court carpet drawing of the 16th and 17th centuries. The cloud-bands sit between larger gold and ivory palmettes whose serrated edges and curling tips give the field its characteristic Indian flowering vitality, with smaller secondary palmettes, rosettes, and tiny pomegranate-bud forms filling the spaces between. The wide antique-gold main border carries a stately repeat of large palmettes alternating with smaller floral cartouches and curling navy leaves, and is framed on both sides by narrow ivory-and-navy guard stripes carrying delicate rosette repeats and a fine reciprocal sawtooth band that adds a quiet rhythm at the rug's edge. Every element is drawn with the calm symmetry and generous spacing that distinguishes top-tier Agra workshop production from busier village weaving.

Colors and Placement

The palette is the warm, sunlit "red and gold" formula that defines the most collected category of Indian carpets, built around a soft tomato-red field that reads almost like brick rose under warm light, framed by a saturated antique-gold main border, and accented through both field and border with midnight navy, sage green, forest green, ivory, mustard, soft rose, and small touches of black. The red ground is rich and consistent across the full field with no abrash and no dye variation. The gold border is luminous without being yellow, with enough depth to anchor the red field and enough warmth to keep the whole rug glowing in soft incandescent light. The cloud-band cartouches in midnight navy add quiet drama and tie the rug to the great Mughal court carpets of the 17th century, while the sage and forest greens through the leaf forms keep the palette lively without ever feeling busy. At 11'7" x 17'8" this rug is sized for serious rooms: a formal living room with a full sofa-and-chair seating arrangement entirely on the rug, a grand dining room with a 10 to 14 person table and chairs comfortably pulled out, a great room or family room as a single dominant anchor, a primary bedroom with a king bed and the rug extending well beyond on all sides, an estate library or paneled study, a hotel or club lobby, or a foyer in a substantial home. It pairs effortlessly with traditional, English country, neoclassical, transitional, and even contemporary interiors that benefit from a warm classical anchor.

Indo Agra Rugs and Construction

Agra has been one of India's most important weaving cities since the Mughal era, when emperors Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan established imperial workshops that produced some of the finest Indo-Persian carpets ever woven. The classical Mughal Agra style absorbed Safavid Persian drawing and married it to Indian floral sensibility and the country's famously long-staple wool, producing the all-over palmette compositions, cloud-band cartouches, and leafy-vine fields that define the Agra tradition to this day. Modern Indo Agra production continues that lineage in workshops across northern India, where master weavers reproduce classical Agra and Mughal-revival patterns using hand-spun wool, cotton foundations, and traditional vegetable and metal-complex dyes that age beautifully over decades. This rug is hand-knotted using the Persian senneh asymmetric knot at 180 knots per square inch, equivalent to roughly 25 knots per cm², and a total of approximately 4.7 million individual hand-tied knots across the full 205 square foot surface. The pile is 100% wool with a substantial hand that gives the rug both weight and longevity, and the foundation is 100% cotton, the standard for fine Agra weaving, providing the dimensional stability that allows a mansion-size rug to lie perfectly flat under heavy furniture for generations. Construction of an Indo Agra at this size and density represents many months of work for a team of skilled weavers, and an authentic hand-knotted Agra in brand-new never-used condition at this scale represents a rare opportunity to acquire a true investment-grade carpet at a significant discount to comparable antique market pricing.