10'7" x 12'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Tribal Garden Panel Design | Semi-Antique 1970s

This is a heavy, honest village piece from the Bakhtiari districts of western Persia, woven in the 1970's and kept in excellent condition with a full, even pile from selvedge to selvedge. At 10'7" x 12'7" it covers a full seating group without crowding the walls, which puts it squarely among 10x13 Persian rugs in practical terms. The wool is the thing you notice first: springy, lanolin-rich mountain fleece knotted onto a cotton foundation, the kind that takes decades of foot traffic and keeps its body. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and knotting.

Design and Motifs

The field is a garden drawing, the khesti idea the Bakhtiari are known for, but handled here as a diamond lattice rather than rigid squares. Each compartment holds its own small planting: ivory panels carrying a dark cypress with a red trunk stripe, navy cells filled with 8 petal rosettes and star blossoms, red cells with angular leaf sprays and tiny animal silhouettes tucked into the corners. Nothing repeats exactly, and the drawing wanders in the way hand-drawn village work always does, with a cell here slightly wider than its neighbor and a color swapped where the weaver ran out of a dye lot. The main border is a broad ivory band of alternating rosette clusters and red diamond cartouches, framed by narrow red guard stripes with serrated palmettes, and the whole composition sits between four clean corners with the ends finished in plain cotton fringe.

A Rustic Burgundy Field with Ivory and Navy

The dominant tone is a rustic burgundy that shifts between oxblood and a brighter madder red depending on how the light crosses the pile, exactly what you want from naturally dyed village wool. Against it, deep navy blue panels read almost inky in shadow and open into a clear indigo in raking light. The ivory compartments and the main border are a warm cream rather than a bleached white, closer to undyed wool, and they carry small notes of rust, soft rose pink and old gold in the rosettes. Forest green appears in the cypress bodies and leaf forms, dark enough to pass for black until you stand over it. Genuine black outlines the lattice and sharpens every motif, and the overall effect is warm and saturated, a rug that anchors a room rather than disappearing into it.

Bakhtiari Weaving in the Chahar Mahal Villages

Bakhtiar rugs come from the Chahar Mahal villages southwest of Isfahan, woven by settled families of the Bakhtiari confederation on the edge of the Zagros highlands. Those pastures produce some of the toughest wool in Persia, and the weavers use it at a generous pile height on a stout cotton warp, so the finished rug is thick, flat-lying and built to outlast the house it goes into. The knotting here is even and firm across the whole field, with straight sides and honest, workmanlike handling of the lattice, which is characteristic of good tribal Persian rugs from this group in the 1970's. If you want to understand how weave, dye and wear together place a piece in its decade, our guide on how to date an oriental rug walks through the same signals we used on this one.