10'8" x 16'10" Persian Mahal Rug | All Over Floral Design | Oversize Wool Pile

This is a big, confident village piece: 10'8" x 16'10" of hand-knotted wool laid out as one continuous floral field, with no central medallion to break it up. The wool has the slightly glossy, chalky handle you get from good highland fleece, and the pile still stands up full and even across the whole surface, which is rare in a room-filling rug of this scale. The back, shown in the last three photos, is a clean blue-toned cotton foundation with tight, legible knot rows and no repairs or reweaves visible. Among oversize Persian rugs this format is genuinely useful, long enough for a full dining table with chairs pulled out or a large seating group floated off the walls. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field runs an all over design built on a lattice of thin ivory vines that connect rank after rank of diamond palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and long serrated leaves. Look closely at images 6 and 7 and the repeat becomes clear: a lozenge palmette outlined in navy sits at each junction, flanked by curled leaves, with small star rosettes and half-blossoms filling the ground between. The drawing is village drawing, angular at the edges and slightly different from one repeat to the next, which is exactly what separates a hand-knotted Mahal from a machine-perfect copy. Framing it is a wide navy main border carrying large in-turned floral heads and rose sprays, set between narrow turquoise and ivory guard stripes that carry a running vine. The corners resolve cleanly, a sign the weavers worked from a proper cartoon rather than improvising the turn.

A Brick Red Field with Navy, Turquoise and Salmon

The ground is a deep brick red that pulls toward rust brown in raking light, the kind of warm earth tone that reads brown in a dim room and red under a lamp. Against it the palette is unusually lively for a village weave: pale turquoise and aqua do most of the work in the palmettes and leaves, backed by inky navy outlines that hold every shape crisp. Salmon pink and rose appear in the rosette petals, ivory and cream in the vine scrolls and blossom centers, with small hits of gold, orange and olive green in the flower hearts, clearest in the macro shots. The navy border is nearly black at a distance and reveals its blue only up close, while the turquoise guard stripes act as a bright seam between border and field. Colors sit steady from end to end with no harsh abrash, and the fringe is clean ivory.

Mahal Weaving and the Arak Weaving Region

Mahal rugs come from the cluster of weaving villages around Arak in west central Persia, the same district that produced the Sultanabad workshop pieces Western dealers have chased for more than a century. The Mahal reputation was never built on knot count; it was built on scale, wool quality and bold, generous drawing that fills a large room without shouting. Weavers there worked on cotton warps with a heavy, springy wool pile, producing rugs sturdy enough to take decades of traffic and still show pattern. That is what you are looking at here: a coarse-to-medium village knot, thick pile, and a design conceived for a room rather than a display wall. Rugs of this length were commissioned pieces, since a loom wide enough for 10'8" and long enough for 16'10" tied up a household workshop for a long stretch, and far fewer of them survive in even, unworn condition than the standard 9x12 format.