11'2" x 18' Antique Persian Sarouk Rug | Coral Field, Navy Medallion | 1930s Oversize

This is a palace scale antique from the 1930s, woven in west Persia and still carrying the soft silky handle that made these pieces famous in American houses nearly a century ago. The field has aged into a warm coral rose, the pile is low and even the whole way across, and the drawing is still crisp enough to read every leaf and rosette. At 11'2" x 18' it is a genuine oversize rug, the kind of piece that anchors a great room or a long formal dining room rather than sitting inside it, and pieces of this age in this size and this state of preservation do not come through often. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity. If you are shopping the top end of the market, it is worth browsing our full run of oversize Persian rugs alongside this one.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built on an enormous elongated medallion outlined in navy, filling nearly the whole field and finished at each end with a stepped pendant and a small cypress-like finial. At the center sits an 8 petal rosette inside a lobed star, surrounded by paired leaf cartouches drawn in indigo and soft green. Inside the medallion the ground is filled edge to edge with detached floral sprays, lotus heads, curling serrated leaves and small rosettes on a fine scrolling vine, the classic Sarouk vocabulary where each blossom sits as its own little bouquet rather than dissolving into a repeat. The 4 corner spandrels carry heavier palmettes and vase forms on a camel and ivory ground. The main border is the strongest element after the medallion: a navy band carrying large scalloped palmettes, turtle forms and sunflower rosettes, flanked by a rose vine minor border and a narrow reciprocal guard at the very edge.

A Coral Field Framed in Indigo and Gold

The field reads as a warm coral, somewhere between salmon and terracotta rose, deeper toward the outer corners and lighter through the middle where the wool catches the light. That kind of tonal drift is what 90 years of gentle oxidation does to a good madder-family dye, and it is the single most attractive thing about the rug in person. Against the coral, the drawing is carried in two blues: a deep indigo navy for the medallion outline, the border ground and the heavier leaves, and a lighter cornflower blue used inside the flower heads. Ivory and butter gold do the lifting, outlining the medallion, filling the spandrels and giving the border its glow, while small accents of sage and bottle green appear in the leaf tips and in the center rosette. There is almost no hard red anywhere, which is exactly why this palette works under modern furniture as easily as it did under 1930s mahogany.

Sarouk Weaving and Why This One Matters

Sarouk is a village and weaving district near Arak in west central Persia, and in the first decades of the 20th century its looms produced the most sought after floor rugs sent to America, to the point that the trade still calls the type the American Sarouk. The recipe was a heavy cotton foundation, a densely packed knot and unusually glossy local wool, which is why a Sarouk of this age can still show a silky sheen after decades of use. Weaving a piece 18 feet long meant a purpose-built loom and a team working the same cartoon for a very long stretch, and the consistency of the field pattern from end to end here tells you the workshop kept its hands steady. You can read more in our Persian Sarough rugs guide, and if you are trying to place this rug in a period, our notes on how to date an oriental rug cover the tells we use on pieces like this one.