By the 1880s a Manchester firm called Ziegler & Co. had set up looms across western Persia and rewritten what a drawing-room carpet could look like. The Sultanabad workshops shifted away from the dense, busy classical Persian carpets and produced fields with air around the motifs, palmettes that breathed, vines that drifted rather than crowded. The pattern in front of you sits in that lineage.

A single weaver took 3 months at the loom. Persian asymmetric knotting at roughly 100 KPSI. Roughly 359,000 hand-tied knots in total. The pile is wool, chosen because it takes plant dye to the depth the cartoon needs without flattening into uniformity. All colour comes from plant matter, prepared in slow vats over weeks rather than minutes; the result is the slight irregularity that gives a hand-knotted vegetable-dyed carpet its patina.

The composition

Colour reads as ivory ground with soft camel. Palmettes scaled up to read at room distance, vines drifting between them, a single guard band at the border. The drawing is restrained where lesser carpets in this style turn busy. With wear, the brighter notes settle and the darker notes open up. The rug arrives ready to start, not finished.

What you are buying

The price reflects the loom-time and the fibre, nothing else. A new Ziegler Sultanabad weaving of this size and density would sell at three to four times this figure through a London or New York dealer; the same piece would carry a similar premium at a major auction house. A hand-knotted carpet of this quality holds its value over decades and tends to gain rather than lose.

The piece in a room

2'6" x 10' (76 x 305 cm) is a runner format for a long corridor, a kitchen galley, or a stair landing. The ivory camel pairs with wooden floors and runs the length of the space without breaking the visual line. The narrow loom width keeps the geometry tight and legible end to end. The rug expects to be looked at, not just walked on.

Conservation

Rotate a half turn each spring and autumn so light and traffic age the pile evenly. Vacuum weekly with the beater bar disengaged, suction only. Blot spills with a clean cotton cloth, never rub. Hand-wash by a wool-trained conservator every five to seven years. With this care the rug runs eighty to a hundred years and outlives its first owners.

Reference

• Medium: hand-knotted wool on cotton foundation
• Dimensions: 2'6" x 10' (76 x 305 cm)
• Construction: Persian asymmetric knot
• Knot density: ~100 KPSI
• Total knot count: ~359,000
• Hands: 1 weaver, 3 months
• Pile: shorn close, hand-finished
• Dye: vegetable-dyed
• Origin: India

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