11'10" x 15' Persian Gabbeh Rug | Modern Geometric Black Field | Brand New, Never Used

This is a big, quiet, confident room piece: an 11'10" x 15' Persian Gabbeh woven with a wide-open black field and a broad beige border that does all the talking. The scale puts it squarely among oversize Persian rugs, large enough to carry a full seating group with every leg on the wool and still leave a margin of floor showing. The pile is thick hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation, the handle is heavy and supple, and the piece is brand new and never used, with no wear, no repair and no restoration anywhere on it. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity documenting the size, the materials and the Persian origin.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the reason to buy this one. Instead of a medallion, the weaver left the field almost entirely empty and scattered just 5 small devices across it: a compact rectangular cartouche at dead center holding 4 arrowhead panels, two stylized cypress or tree forms with a burgundy trunk and gold branches, and two small diamond clusters on slender stems. Everything else is pushed to the border, which steps in and out of the field like a skyline. Four barred roundels, one centered on each side, read as circles split by ivory bars inside a heavy burgundy ring, and the 4 corners are filled with large shield shaped panels of diagonal gold rays broken by black dashes. Between them sit stepped ziggurat forms, small crosshatched squares, T shapes and blocks of solid color, the kind of confident angular vocabulary that puts this among the more architectural geometric Persian rugs we carry. The whole border is framed inside a thin burgundy line and finished with a plain black outer guard and ivory cotton fringe.

Color and Abrash

The field is not a flat black. Look at it in raking light, as in the close detail shots, and it moves through soot black, charcoal, cool grey and a warm smoky brown, streaked horizontally with the natural abrash of hand-spun, small-lot dyed wool. That variation is what keeps a field this large from going dead, and it is a mark of the yarn rather than a flaw. Against it, the border runs through the beige family in real range: pale ivory and oatmeal, a soft sand, olive tinged gold and a deeper honey gold, with taupe and mid brown blocks for weight. Burgundy is the accent and it is used sparingly and deliberately, in the roundel rings, the thin framing line, the tree trunks and a handful of small squares, deep and slightly wine toned rather than bright. A few black bars and dashes are carried up into the beige border so the two halves of the palette speak to each other. The net effect is warm neutral against near black, which sits comfortably with walnut, brass, leather and stone.

Persian Gabbeh Weaving and Quality

Gabbeh is the village and tribal tradition of southern Persia, historically a thick, coarse-knotted rug woven for the weaver's own household rather than for the market, which is exactly why the tradition tolerates empty fields, bold color blocks and improvised motifs that a city workshop would never allow. This piece takes that freedom and applies it at room scale with a deliberately drawn, almost deco cadence, which is where it overlaps with the best of today's modern and contemporary hand-knotted rugs. The wool is hand-spun and lanolin rich, which is why the pile has that dry sheen in the photographs and why the colors shift as you walk around it. Knot count is moderate by design, as it should be on a Gabbeh, and the return is a dense, heavy, long-wearing rug built for a floor that gets used. The back shows even, well packed rows and straight selvages, and at 11'10" x 15' the piece lies flat and square without a single wave in it.