10'2" x 12'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Red Field, Ivory Star Medallion | Semi Antique, Excellent Condition

This 10'2" x 12'7" Bakhtiar is village weaving at its most confident: a deep red field carrying a wide radiating star medallion, boxed in by navy cornerpieces and framed by a rust brown border of flowerheads. It is a true room size piece, about 10 by 13 feet, with a 3/8" wool pile that still stands full and even across the whole surface and a cotton foundation that has stayed flat and square, as photographs 2 and 3 show on the showroom floor. The wool has the dry, slightly glassy sheen that only highland fleece develops with age, and the pile has worn in rather than worn down, which is what puts it in the semi antique bracket rather than the modern one. Rugs like this sit comfortably inside the broader family of Persian Bakhtiar rugs and fill the same footprint as our other 10x13 Persian rugs. It ships with a certificate of authenticity naming origin, materials, knotting and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a small hexagonal rosette, ringed in ivory and outlined in blue, from which a broad star medallion opens outward in tiers of lobed petals, each petal filled with a pale flowerhead on a navy or oxblood ground (see the close-up, image 4). Around that medallion the red field is drawn with palmettes, serrated leaves, curling vine scroll and small eight petal rosettes, set in an all over arrangement that mirrors across both axes rather than repeating mechanically, so no two quarters read exactly alike. The 4 corners carry large navy spandrels with ivory outlines and big rust palmettes inside them, a device that pins the medallion firmly in place. The main border is a rust brown band of linked diamond flowerheads and blue rosettes with small stems and leaf sprays between, flanked on both sides by ivory and navy guard stripes of running flowerheads. The drawing is floral in vocabulary but village in hand: slightly angular, boldly scaled, and far more alive than a workshop copy of the same layout.

A Madder Red Field With Ivory, Indigo and Rust

Red and ivory are the two colors that run the rug. The field is a warm madder red, closer to brick and tomato than to pure crimson, and it shifts gently in bands of abrash across the width where one dye lot gave way to the next, visible in the angled photograph. Against it the ivory does all the structural work: it outlines the medallion, draws the spandrel edges, and runs as a thin lattice of vine through the field so the pattern stays legible from standing height. Indigo and navy supply the depth, filling the cornerpieces and the petal grounds and reappearing as small rosettes in the border. Rust and terracotta carry the palmettes, with softer peach and salmon tones inside the flowerheads, and a charcoal brown runs through the outlines and the border ground to keep everything anchored. Scattered touches of pale sky blue, olive and warm gray in the small flowers break up the red and are what make the rug look collected rather than matched. Overall it reads warm and saturated, and it will take red, cream, brown, brass and dark wood furnishings without a fight.

Woven in the Bakhtiar Villages of Chahar Mahal

Bakhtiar weaving comes from the Chahar Mahal valleys southwest of Isfahan, in settled villages such as Shalamzar, Saman, Boldaji and Farsan, where families of Bakhtiari background weave on village looms using wool from the Zagros highland flocks. That fleece is the reason these pieces last: it is coarse, high in lanolin and springy, and it resists crushing in a way that softer workshop wool does not. The construction follows suit, with a heavy cotton foundation, a stout weft between knot rows and a full 3/8" pile, which is why a Bakhtiar of this age can still show an even, upright surface. Knot count here is moderate by design rather than by compromise, the trade being a bold, generous drawing scale and a structure built for decades of traffic in a living room or under a dining table. The back, shown in image 6 with the Authentic Handmade tag and the measuring rule, reads clean and regular, with clear knot definition, intact selvedges and the original hand-knotted fringe still at full length at both ends.