13'6" x 19'9" Modern Designer Hand-knotted Indo Gabbeh Rug | Green Multi | Oversize Wool Rug | 140-160 KPSI

This oversize 13'6" x 19'9" hand-knotted Indo Gabbeh is a contemporary designer reinterpretation of the classic Qashqai nomadic textile, woven in India on a sturdy cotton foundation with a dense wool pile at 140 to 160 KPSI. The rug's painterly bands of emerald, forest, lime, teal, sage, and mint flow vertically across the field, broken up by columns of natural undyed taupe and ivory wool. Tiny tribal pictograms and stylized cypress-like plants are scattered through the lighter stripes, a direct nod to the storytelling tradition of Persian Gabbeh weaving. At nearly 14 by 20 feet, it's a true palace-size statement piece, built for great rooms, lofts, and grand open-plan interiors.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a modern striped Gabbeh field, an evolution of the traditional Qashqai "rangi" (rainbow) Gabbeh in which the weaver works without a cartoon and lets vertical color bands emerge intuitively from the loom. There is no medallion, no formal border, no corner spandrels — the entire composition is the field itself, divided into roughly twenty uneven vertical stripes of varying width. Within several of the lighter stripes, the weaver has scattered small four-petal botanical motifs and tiny upright cypress-like figures in red and gold. In Persian and Indo-Persian tribal weaving, the cypress (sarv) is a symbol of immortality and steadfastness, while scattered botanicals represent the wildflowers and grazing fields the nomadic weavers walked through with their flocks. The deliberate irregularity — stripes that wobble, colors that bleed into each other, motifs placed asymmetrically — is the signature of authentic hand-knotted Gabbeh work, where the weaver's hand is meant to be visible rather than hidden.

Colors and Placement

The palette is built around a green family that shifts in temperature from one end of the rug to the other. The left half of the field is dominated by deep emerald and forest green stripes, accented by two narrow chartreuse-yellow bands that carry most of the red and gold tribal motifs. The center of the rug transitions through soft sage and mid-tone teal, with vertical columns of natural camel and taupe undyed wool breaking up the saturated greens. The right half cools into mint, pale aqua, and soft seafoam stripes, with a final cluster of olive and moss-green bands at the far edge. Throughout, narrow vertical strips of ivory and warm beige natural wool act as visual breathing space between the dyed bands, and tiny accents of crimson red and mustard gold appear inside the cypress and floral pictograms scattered across the lighter stripes. The end finishes are a flat-woven kilim skirt in matching green, with a clean ivory selvage running the full length of both sides.

Indo Gabbeh Rugs and Construction

Gabbeh weaving originated with the Qashqai and Luri nomads of southwestern Persia, where the word "gabbeh" itself refers to a thick, coarse, intentionally rustic pile rug woven for the weaver's own use rather than the export market. Over the past three decades, Indian master workshops — particularly in the Bhadohi and Mirzapur weaving belts of Uttar Pradesh — have adopted the Gabbeh tradition and refined it into a designer category, pairing the original tribal vocabulary with finer wool, more controlled dye lots, and tighter knot counts than typical village Persian Gabbehs. This rug is hand-knotted at 140 to 160 KPSI, which works out to roughly 22,000 to 25,000 individual hand-tied knots per square meter — meaning the full 24.7 square meter surface contains somewhere between 540,000 and 615,000 knots, every one tied by hand on a vertical loom. The cotton foundation gives the rug dimensional stability at this oversize scale, and the dense wool pile delivers the plush, cushioned hand that defines premium Gabbeh weaving. Construction at this size and density typically represents six to nine months of continuous loom time for a team of weavers.