10'8" x 16'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Red Floral Medallion | 1980s Oversize

This is a proper room filler, a hand-knotted Persian Tabriz from the 1980s measuring 10'8" x 16'9" with a deep crimson field, an ivory and indigo star medallion, and a navy border of willow trees that runs the full perimeter. The wool is dense and still carries its original luster, the pile is even from end to end, and the rug has come in from an estate in perfect, unworn shape. At this scale it belongs among the true oversize Persian rugs, the kind that sets the whole footprint of a great room rather than floating inside it. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, age, materials and size.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 lobed star medallion built in layers: a salmon core drawn with fine ivory arabesques, a ring of navy petals filled with red and light blue blossoms, then a wide band of ivory lattice hatching that gives the medallion its glow from across a room. Cusped ivory pendants extend from the top and bottom, and matching lattice spandrels close the 4 corners. Across the red ground runs a continuous system of curved vine, split palmettes, rosettes and lanceolate leaves, all drawn with the flowing curvilinear line that separates city work from village weaving. The main border is the piece of drawing collectors look for here: on an indigo ground, weeping willow trees alternate with cypress clusters and scrolling vases, flanked by ivory guard stripes of carnation and palmette and a light blue outer stripe of vine. It is a garden border, and on a rug nearly 17 feet long it reads as a framed landscape around the field.

Color: Crimson Field, Indigo Border, Olive Green Foliage

The field is a true crimson red with a slight raspberry cast in raking light, saturated rather than orange, and it has aged into the soft tonal movement good wool develops with time. Against it the border sits in a deep indigo navy that is almost black in the shadowed photographs and clearly blue in close-up. The secondary palette carries the design: olive green leaves and calyxes, powder and sky blue flowerheads, ivory and cream in the lattice work and guard stripes, and warm salmon to peach in the medallion core and the scrolling vases of the border. Small touches of soft rose and pale gold appear in the individual blossoms. It is a red and blue rug at a glance, but the green and ivory are what keep it from going heavy, and they give decorators a clean bridge to painted walls, wood tones and green upholstery.

Tabriz: Weaving City of Northwest Persia

Tabriz has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, and its workshops are the ones that kept the drawn cartoon tradition alive at large scale. Fineness there is measured in Raj, knots counted across a gereh of the width, and even at the workshop grades used for room size orders a Tabriz weaver is held to a straight, disciplined line: the vine curls evenly, the medallion halves mirror one another, and the border repeat stays on register across 16 feet and 9 inches of length. This rug shows that discipline in the back, where the knotting is regular and tight on a cotton foundation, and in the way the willow border turns each corner without breaking the pattern. The wool is the tough, lustrous highland fleece the region is known for, which is why a rug woven in the 1980s can still arrive with full pile. For anyone working out where a piece like this sits on the timeline, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we use on the floor.