11'10" x 14'5" Chobi Ziegler Oriental Rug | Chocolate Brown & Gold All-Over Floral | New, Never Used

This is a big, quiet, confident room-filler: 11'10" x 14'5" of hand-knotted wool worked in the Ziegler Chobi manner, with a deep chocolate brown field and a wide antique gold border. The wool is hand-spun and dyed with natural vegetable dyes, which is why the brown reads as a living color rather than a flat block, shifting between espresso and cocoa as you walk around it. It has never been used, the pile stands a full 5/16" high, and the weave sits square and heavy with no curl at the edges. Pieces this wide belong with the oversize 12x14 area rugs a buyer looks at when a great room or open plan floor needs one single statement instead of two smaller rugs. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted, together with its measurements, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion. Instead the weaver ran a classic all-over floral lattice across the whole field, the Ziegler reworking of the old Sultanabad drawing: thin scrolling vines carrying broad serrated leaves, split palmettes and open rosettes that repeat but never quite line up, so the eye keeps moving. The center of the field holds a large sage green rosette with a 6 armed burgundy star at its heart, echoed by smaller 8 petal blossoms scattered through the vine work. The main border runs a procession of turtle palmettes and cloud-band leaves, flanked by two narrow guard stripes of reciprocal cross motifs and tiny boxed flower heads. Corners are resolved properly, with the border pattern turning cleanly at all 4 corners rather than being cut off, which is the quickest way to judge whether a weaver was working from a good cartoon.

The Chocolate Brown and Antique Gold Palette

Brown is the rarer choice in this weave and it is the reason this rug works in rooms where a red or ivory ground would fight the furniture. The field is a dark cocoa brown with faint natural abrash, the gentle horizontal banding of hand-spun, vegetable dyed yarn that you can see clearly in the close-up photographs. Against it, the vines and leaves are drawn in butter gold, pale straw and warm beige, with cooler sage and celadon green used for the larger leaves and rosette centers. Small hits of deep burgundy and near-black outline give the drawing its definition. The border reverses the scheme: an antique gold ground, soft and slightly bleached in tone, carrying brown, green and wine red palmettes, then finished with a solid dark brown outer edge and natural ivory fringe. Under lamplight the gold warms considerably; in daylight it settles toward honey and old parchment.

Peshawar Weaving and the Ziegler Tradition

Chobi means "wood" in reference to the plant and root dyes used, and the Chobi Ziegler workshops around Peshawar in northern Pakistan have become the main source for this style of hand-knotted Oriental rug today. The formula is old: highland wool, hand-spun so the yarn takes dye unevenly and ages beautifully, knotted on a cotton foundation and then washed to soften the palette. The back of this piece, shown in the fold photographs, is evenly knotted with clean, regular rows and no visible gaps, and the selvedges are wrapped tight in matching brown wool. At 11'10" x 14'5" a rug of this scale takes a team of weavers well over a year on a single loom, and the fact that the drawing holds its rhythm from one end to the other across nearly 15 feet is the real measure of the workshop behind it.