10' x 13' Persian Mashad Rug | All-Over Botanical Repeat on Burgundy | Woven Cartouche, Circa 1980s

A full room-size floor piece with none of the usual compromises: the wool is heavy, the pile stands up evenly from end to end, and the drawing holds its rhythm across all 130 square feet. Among Persian Mashad rugs this one belongs to the workshop side of the trade rather than the village side, and the small woven cartouche set into the upper red border is the usual mark of that. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, finished with hand-whipped selvedges and short ivory fringe, and the back shows a tight, regular knot face with no repairs or reweaving. This 10' x 13' Persian Mashad rug ships with a certificate of authenticity from Rugs.net.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the field carries a staggered all-over repeat of upright botanical clusters, each one built from a stepped diamond lattice cartouche flanked by two heavy curled leaves that read almost like scrolled rams horns, with a small 4 petal rosette tucked beneath and tiny cruciform fillers and star specks scattered in the open red ground between them. Look closely at the detail shots and you can see the draftsman varied the lattice fills: some cartouches hold 6 squares, some hold cross forms, some hold pale salmon panels. The triple border system is where the design earns its weight. The navy main border runs a bold arabesque of hooked vine and palmette, the middle band on red sets single cypress sprigs between hooked rosettes, and the broad outer band repeats an arrowhead and diamond trellis in dark indigo on red. Narrow olive and ivory barber pole guard stripes separate every band and keep the whole frame from going heavy.

A Close Read on the Color

The field is a saturated burgundy that leans cherry where the light catches the pile and sinks toward oxblood in the shadows, the kind of madder-family red that reads as a solid anchor color in a room rather than a bright one. Against it the main border is a deep indigo navy, nearly black at the corners, which is what makes the red look as deep as it does. The motifs themselves work through a narrow, disciplined palette: chocolate and walnut brown for the curled leaves, soft olive and khaki for the lattice grounds, ivory and cream for the outlines and the small rosettes, and pale salmon or peach for the squares inside the cartouches. Scattered single knots of clear cerulean blue act as punctuation across the field. The guard stripes bring in the only cool green in the rug, a muted sage that runs the full perimeter. It is a warm, low-contrast, candlelit sort of color scheme, and it sits comfortably with wood tones, brass and leather.

Mashad, Khorasan, and the Weave

Mashad sits in Khorasan, in the far northeast of Persia, and has supplied the room-size end of the market for well over a century on the strength of two things: long-staple Khorasan wool with real spring to it, and organized workshop production that could carry one drawing cleanly across a 13 foot length. A signed cartouche means a workshop piece, drawn on a cartoon by a designer and knotted by weavers working to it, which is exactly what you see in the even spacing of the repeat and the unbroken border corners. The pile is left a touch longer than a city rug of the same age, so the surface feels plush underfoot and the wool takes light well. In the 10x13 Persian rugs group this is the practical choice for a large seating area or a long dining table, where the border needs to still be visible past the furniture legs.