10'5" x 14' Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Field with Navy Floral Medallion | Woven in the 2000s

This 10'5" x 14' Persian Sarouk rug is a full formal room piece, woven in the 2000's with a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation, and it arrives in perfect condition with a certificate of authenticity. The field is one continuous sheet of deep red carrying a symmetrical lattice of vine scroll, and a navy medallion sits dead center with ivory spandrels answering it at the 4 corners. Pieces in the tradition of Persian Sarouk rugs are bought for exactly this combination: a heavy, tightly packed pile that takes daily traffic without flattening, and classical drawing that settles into a dining room or a large living room without looking busy. At 125" x 168" it sits comfortably in the 10x14 Persian rugs range, large enough to carry a 10 seat table with all chairs pulled out.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed navy medallion with a serrated outline, and inside it an ivory cartouche frames an 8 petal rosette in green, rose and soft gold. Paired pendants drop above and below the medallion on the long axis, each one a small navy palmette outlined in red. Around that, the field runs an all-over vine scroll: thin curling stems that connect palmettes, half palmettes, leaf sprays and small rose heads, with no two quadrants reading as mechanical copies once you look closely at the filler blossoms. The 4 ivory spandrels carry the heaviest drawing in the rug, dense arabesque scrollwork in navy, teal and wine that isolates the red field into a clean oval. The main border is navy, filled with an alternating rhythm of turquoise palmettes and flowering vine, and it is flanked by narrow reciprocal guard stripes in ivory, teal and camel that keep the transition from field to edge crisp rather than abrupt.

A Deep Red Field Against Navy, Ivory and Teal

The dominant color is a clear, saturated true red, warm rather than orange, and it reads slightly deeper toward the ends where the pile lies against the light. Navy is the counterweight: the medallion, the main border and the outlines of the larger palmettes all sit in the same dark indigo tone, which is what gives the rug its depth from across a room. Ivory does the lifting work in the 4 corner spandrels, in the medallion core and in the thin outline that traces each vine, so the scrollwork stays legible against the red instead of dissolving into it. Scattered through the field are teal and turquoise blossoms, soft camel and gold leaves, a muted green, and small touches of rose and wine that appear in the flower heads. Photographed from different angles the field shifts between bright cherry and a cooler garnet, which is the normal directional sheen of a good wool pile rather than any variation in the dye.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a weaving village in the Arak district of central Persia, and its name has stood for durability in the rug trade for well over a century. Weavers there work the asymmetric Persian knot on a cotton warp and weft, then beat each row down hard, so the finished rug carries more wool per square foot than most village work of comparable size. The back of this piece shows that construction plainly: even, tightly packed rows, straight sides and a flat, honest handle with no stiffness or buckling. The drawing follows the classical central medallion formula that Sarouk and the neighboring Arak workshops standardized, executed here with the curvilinear vine work that separates a workshop Sarouk from a purely geometric village rug. Practically, this is a rug meant to be walked on: a 3/8" wool pile in perfect condition, full and even from end to end, with the fringe and selvages intact.