10'2" x 15'6" Persian Mahal Rug | Soft Red All-Over Floral Field | Navy Star Medallion

This is a room-filling floor piece: 10 feet 2 inches by 15 feet 6 inches of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the Mahal manner with a soft red field carrying an unbroken lattice of flowering vine. Unlike many oversize Persian rugs of this scale, the drawing here never coarsens; the pattern holds the same rhythm from the fringe to the center of the field. The pile is even and full, the selvages are tight, and the back shown in the final photograph reads cleanly with no repairs or reweaves. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is a genuine hand-knotted Persian piece.

Design and Motifs

A small indigo star medallion sits at the center, built from 8 points and filled with rose, sage and ivory palmettes around a tiny cream rosette. It anchors rather than dominates, because the real subject is the all-over floral design that surrounds it: leafy boteh cartouches, split palmettes, serrated saz leaves and open rosettes strung on a thin ivory vine that runs corner to corner. Matching pendants finish the medallion at the top and bottom of the field, and the 4 corners repeat the same vocabulary rather than using solid spandrels, which is what keeps the pattern reading as one continuous garden. The main border is a navy turtle-palmette band framed by 2 pairs of light blue guard stripes and a fine ivory reciprocal line, so the field is enclosed without being crowded.

A Soft Red Field Against Indigo Blue

The ground is a soft red, closer to a warm brick or terracotta than to a hard crimson, and it has the slight tonal movement across the width that natural dyes give a large field. Against it the deep indigo blue of the medallion and main border does the heavy structural work, while a lighter sky blue in the guard stripes and in many of the smaller leaf forms lifts the whole surface. Ivory outlines every vine and every flower head, which is why the pattern stays legible from across a room, and secondary notes of sage green, camel, rose pink and a dark aubergine appear inside the palmettes and boteh. The combination is warm without being heavy and reads equally well against dark wood floors, pale oak and stone.

Mahal Weaving from the Arak Region

Mahal rugs come from the villages of the Sultanabad district around Arak in west central Persia, the same weaving region that produced the classic Persian Sarouk rugs, and the two names have long been sold side by side. The district was built on large-format weaving, so looms wide enough for a 10 foot piece were normal there when they were rare elsewhere, and the local wool is long-stapled and glossy, which is why Mahal pile wears slowly and takes on a sheen with use. This example is a floral Mahal of the finer village grade: the knot count is high enough to carry curved vine work and small paisley forms cleanly, which village weaving does not always manage, and the wool has the dry, springy handle that tells you it was spun and dyed in the region rather than bought in.