10' x 15'2" Persian Kerman Rug | Beige Floral Medallion with Open Field | 1980s Semi-Antique

This is the quiet version of a Kerman, and the hardest kind to weave well. A single oval medallion of packed flowers floats in the middle of a wide, undecorated beige field, and everything else is pushed out to a deep garland border that curves inward in a soft scalloped arc. A weaver cannot hide anything in a field that empty: the wool has to be sorted for consistency, the knotting has to stay perfectly even, and the drawing of the medallion has to be centered to the inch. Hand-knotted in the 1980s on a cotton foundation with a wool pile, it measures a genuinely room-filling 10' x 15'2", and it belongs among oversize Persian rugs that are meant to seat an entire furniture group rather than sit under a coffee table. Pile is full and even throughout, the ends and fringes are sound, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is an elongated oval built entirely from botanical drawing: full-blown cabbage roses, chrysanthemums with gold hearts, small five petal blossoms, forget-me-nots and slim lanceolate leaves, all threaded together on hair-thin stems and outlined in dark brown so each flower separates cleanly from its neighbor. Symmetry runs through both axes, so the left half mirrors the right and the top mirrors the bottom, with a tall pendant finial rising from each end and two small floral anchors set out at the sides. Beyond the empty field the design resumes as a broad, unruled garland: instead of a hard framing line, the flowers themselves form the border, spilling in from the edges in loose bouquets and sprays until they break into a scalloped inner edge. The corners fill with the densest clusters, and the whole composition reads as a garden seen from above with a clearing in the middle.

A Beige Field Lit by Pink, Burgundy and Blue

The ground is a warm beige with a faint peach cast, a shade that changes with the light and goes almost cream under a window and closer to sand in the evening. Against it the palette is deliberately garden-bright but never loud: deep burgundy and raspberry roses, soft rose pink and pale blush buds, mid blue and sky blue blossoms with gold centers, a scattering of true gold and saffron flower heads, and two greens, a dark olive for the shaded leaves and a fresh moss green for the stems. Ivory highlights sit inside many of the petals and keep the darker reds from going heavy, while fine brown outlines draw every element and act as the design's skeleton. The border carries the strongest color and the field carries none, which is exactly why the rug settles so easily into a neutral room: the beige does the work, and the flowers behave like a frame.

Kerman: Flower Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the southeast of Persia, in a high desert province that has produced the country's most painterly floral weaving for centuries. Kerman workshops work from detailed cartoons rather than memory, which is why their roses look observed rather than stylized, and why the pictorial garden border became the region's signature. The local wool takes dye softly, giving the pinks and blues the slightly powdered quality visible in the close-up photos, and the weave is a firm, evenly beaten single-medallion construction on a cotton foundation with a medium pile that has worn level across all 15 feet of length. The back shown in these photographs is clear and regular, with the design legible knot for knot, the mark of a workshop piece rather than a village one. If you want to understand the clues that place a piece like this in the 1980s, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same reading.