Ultimate Guide to Oushak Rugs

By Storied Rugs7 min read

Airy villa living room with clay pink walls, terracotta floor, linen sofa and pale oak armchairs on a beige rug with a charcoal border

An Oushak is a rug from Usak, a town in western Anatolia in Turkey, known for large, soft medallions on a pale, open field. We do not sell Oushak rugs, not a single one. You deserve to know that in the first line rather than after twenty minutes of searching. The rest of this guide is still worth your time. The word “Oushak” now means two very different things, and the look it describes is easy to find under another name.

What is an Oushak rug?

You will see the name written Oushak, Ushak or Usak, and all three mean the same town and the same rugs. Usak has been a weaving center for five centuries.^[1] Its fame did not rest on fineness. Oushak weavers tied a fairly coarse knot with long, glossy local wool, and they used that coarseness on purpose. It let them draw enormous motifs, leave the field open and weave true room sizes at a time when most rugs were small.^[2]

The look that came out of it is the one people mean today. The palette is soft and chalky: saffron and old gold, terracotta, powder blue and ivory. There are one or two very large medallions, or an all-over pattern spaced so widely that the ground shows as much as the drawing.^[3] The long wool catches the light. By the late nineteenth century these rugs were being woven in quantity for European and American houses, which is why so many are 8 by 10 and larger.

Farmhouse sitting room with a large antique Oushak carpet, pale ivory field and one huge saffron and terracotta medallion, linen sofa and leather armchairs — An antique Oushak, the kind we do not sell: one enormous soft-edged medallion, a field left mostly open and a palette gone chalky. The scale of the drawing is what people really mean by the word.

Antique, vintage or modern Oushak: what the word means now

A genuine antique Oushak was woven in or near that town long ago. Its wool is worn to a sheen and its colors have shifted over a century of daylight. Rugs like that are bought by collectors and by dealers who specialize in them. We are not that kind of shop. If a real antique Oushak is what you want, a specialist dealer or a rug auction is the place to look. We would rather send you there than sell you something close and let you find out later. Antique vs vintage rugs explains what those age labels usually mean.

“Vintage Oushak” is a looser label for rugs a few decades old. Because the export trade later moved to other towns, it is worth asking where a rug sold under that name was actually woven.

The other meaning is the one you meet almost everywhere online. “Oushak” has become a style label for new rugs, often sold as modern Oushak, made recently in Turkey, India or Pakistan in that palette and at that scale. Some are hand-knotted and perfectly decent. Many are power-loomed. A great number of both are chemically washed to look faded, because the soft, sun-bleached color is the whole appeal and nobody wants to wait fifty years for it.

That washing has a cost. When a new rug looks old, something was done to it. A bleach wash strips out color, and it also damages the wool fiber itself. That is why many “antique-washed” rugs feel slightly dry and papery in the hand. Age does the same job slowly, over decades instead of in one chemical wash. We explain how in why vintage colors age so beautifully, and overdyed vs naturally faded rugs shows how to spot a treated rug.

Two close views of cut wool pile: aged pile shifting between rose, terracotta and gold, and bleached pile in one flat tone — Left, fifty years of daylight: the color shifts from knot to knot. Right, a new rug bleached to look old, one even tone all over. The evenness gives it away.

Isparta: where the Oushak trade moved

The export weaving that Oushak was built on carried on into the twentieth century, but its center moved. Isparta, in southwest Turkey, became the main center for the same business: workshop weaving, room sizes and soft palettes, made for houses abroad rather than for local use. American dealers sold these rugs for decades under the trade name Sparta.

That is the rug we sell. Most of our Turkish rugs are Isparta rugs, with Manisa and a few village rugs listed simply as Anatolian making up the rest. The full picture is in our guide to Turkish rugs.

They are not Oushaks, and we do not describe them as Oushaks. What they share is the part most people are shopping for. They have western Anatolian wool, a pale, open field and, more often than not, a single large medallion. They also have fifty years of real light on the surface.

Why Isparta rugs have the Oushak palette

Cream is the most common field on an Isparta rug, and many of the others have cream somewhere in the drawing. Greige, taupe, muted pink, dusty rose and sage fill in the pattern. Two things put those colors there. Weavers left much of the wool undyed, so the ground is often natural cream, and even a strong dye looks softer against it. And these rugs have spent half a century in daylight, which moves a clear red slowly toward rose and a strong green toward sage.^[4]

The result is what people are looking for when they search for an Oushak: a large rug that does not fight the room it lands in.

Blue turns up too. A little over a quarter of our Turkish rugs have some blue in the drawing, usually a soft slate, denim or dusty blue set against cream. That is the closest we come to a blue Oushak, and our blue rugs collection gathers them with the Persian ones.

Cream and sage Turkish Isparta rug with a soft medallion before a sage linen sofa and old oak chest in a white board barn room — An Isparta, 5 feet 6 inches by 9 feet 7 inches, in cream and sage. We won’t call it an Oushak, but this western Anatolian rug, hand-knotted about fifty years ago, is the closest thing to that look you can buy today.

One real difference: the pile is low

Every Turkish rug we sell has a low pile. Oushaks were known for a longer, softer pile, so this is a real difference and not a small one. For a modern house it usually falls on the right side. The drawing stays clear, a door clears the rug, and a dining chair pushes back without catching.

What an Oushak-style rug costs

Most of our Turkish rugs cost between $300 and $600. An antique Oushak in good condition at room size usually costs many thousands of dollars. Good room-size pieces are scarce and widely wanted, and that is most of why they cost so much. A new Oushak-style rug from a furniture store often costs about the same as ours, even though it is a fraction of the age. That is the whole trade-off, and we set it out in more detail in the cost of rugs explained.

Spanish Revival entrance hall with ochre walls, a cream Isparta rug with one slate blue medallion down a dark oak floor, carved console — An Isparta, 6 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 11 inches, down a wide hall, its cream field left open around one slate blue medallion. The scale is the point: a big, open field looks calm rather than busy.

How to find the Oushak look in a vintage rug

If it is the Oushak feeling you are after rather than the name, three filters get you most of the way.

Start with a pale field. Browse cream or neutral rugs, because the open, pale ground is the signature.
Go up in size. Look at large or extra large rugs, since big drawing only works on a rug big enough to carry it.
Stay on the Turkish side. The Turkish rugs have the western Anatolian wool and the natural fading.

Looking for an Oushak runner? Our Turkish rugs are almost all room sizes and very few are runners, so start with our runners and look for a pale field.

If you are still deciding between Persian and Turkish, we compared them in Persian and Turkish rugs: how to tell them apart. If the room is the real question rather than the rug, start with size.

From the collection