10'7" x 14'8" Persian Sarouk Rug | Antique 1930s Allover Floral | Soft Coral Red & Navy

This is a genuine antique from the 1930s, a room-filling 10'7" x 14'8" piece woven in the great workshop era of Persian Sarouk rugs, and it has survived with the pile still standing tall and the drawing still crisp. The field is a soft coral red, filled edge to edge with detached floral sprays in navy, olive and gold, and framed by a deep indigo main border. At close to 11 by 15 feet it sits squarely among the oversize Persian rugs that anchor a full living room or a long formal dining table with chairs pulled out. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The weaver used the classic Sarouk allover floral design, a repeating lattice of detached sprays that float on open ground: 8 petal rosettes with square centers, serrated palmette fans, curling acanthus leaves and small blossom clusters joined by thin vine stems. Each spray is drawn twice, mirrored across the vertical axis, so the field reads as ordered rather than busy, and the repeat shifts just enough from row to row that the eye keeps moving. The main border carries a stately procession of palmettes and leafy branches on indigo, held between coral guard stripes of rosettes and a fine outer meander. The 4 corners resolve cleanly, which on a rug of this width is real drafting work and one of the first things a buyer should look at.

A Study in Coral Red, Indigo and Olive

The ground is a soft coral red, closer to salmon and dusty rose than to fire engine red, and it has the gentle tonal drift through the field that only decades of mellowing produce. Against it the blues do most of the work: a deep near-black indigo outlines the leaves and fills the main border, while a lighter sky blue picks out small buds and leaf tips and keeps the pattern from going heavy. The olive green runs from a mossy tone in the vines to a bright chartreuse in the leaf fans, and that acid green is the signal of the period, a color modern weaving rarely gets right. Touches of apricot, gold and soft peach light the larger blossoms, and an ivory white appears only in the fringe and the thinnest outlines. The wool takes light unevenly in the best way, so the coral looks rose from one end of the room and warm terracotta from the other.

Sarouk Weaving and the 1930s Workshops

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of west central Persia, and in the 1920s and 1930s its looms were producing the heavy, tightly packed floral rugs that filled American parlors. The recipe is specific: a cotton warp and weft beaten down hard, a thick, springy wool pile clipped medium high, and a knot count fine enough to draw a curved vine without breaking it into steps. That construction is why this rug has 90 years behind it and still stands up: Sarouk wool from this region is dense and greasy with lanolin, so it wears slowly and takes dye deeply. The back photograph shows the even, straight rows of knotting and the tight cotton foundation that make a rug of this size lie flat. If you want to understand what puts a piece like this in the 1930s rather than later, our guide on how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used.