11'3" x 15'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Ivory Star Medallion on Terracotta Red Field | Oversize Village Weave

At 11'3" x 15'7" this Bakhtiar covers a full great room wall to wall, and it does it with the kind of drawing you only get from a village loom that has woven the same medallion for generations. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted, with the settled, close-cropped surface of a rug that has been used and looked after rather than stored away. Weight and body are what you notice first when it is rolled out: Bakhtiar wool is heavy and springy, and a piece this large sits flat and stays put. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity, and pieces in the oversize Persian rugs range ship free to all 50 states, freight surcharge included, which is not how the rest of the trade handles a 15 foot rug.

Design and Motifs

The center is a large ivory lozenge medallion carrying a dark brown core and, at the very middle, an 8 petal rosette drawn in blue and rose over a rust ground. Out of the medallion run tall serrated pendants at top and bottom, each stepped and hooked in the angular village manner rather than curved. The ivory panel is filled with small rosettes, hooked palmettes and curling leaf forms, all outlined in brown so the drawing stays legible from across the room. Around it the terracotta field carries scrolling vine, palmettes and bird-like leaf tips, and the 4 corner spandrels flip the palette to teal blue with ivory tracery, a device common to the best geometric medallion rugs of the Zagros villages. The wide salmon main border runs alternating shield cartouches and dark palmette forms, framed by narrow guard stripes of little flowerheads.

Color Palette: Ivory, Red, Green and Blue

The field red is a terracotta brick rather than a bright red, warm and slightly earthen, and it carries a gentle abrash that shifts a shade lighter across the width the way naturally dyed village wool does. Against it the medallion ivory is a soft undyed cream, close to oatmeal in the photographs, and it is what pulls the eye to the center. The blue is a dusty teal, not navy, filling the 4 corner spandrels and reappearing in the star at the heart of the rosette and in the small guard stripe flowers. Greens run quiet: a sage and a deeper pine tucked into leaves and cartouche interiors. Add the salmon of the main border, the dark umber brown of the outlining, and touches of gold and rose in the smaller blossoms, and you have a palette that reads warm and layered from a distance and reveals a dozen separate tones up close.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Bakhtiar rugs come out of the Chahar Mahal district in the Zagros highlands west of Isfahan, woven in settled villages such as Shahr Kord, Saman and Chalshotor by weavers of the Bakhtiari confederation. The wool is the point: flocks graze high pasture, the fleece is long-stapled and rich in lanolin, and a Bakhtiar takes traffic for decades without going flat or dull. Knotting here is Turkish (symmetrical) on a cotton foundation, moderate in count but tight and firmly beaten, which is exactly what an 11'3" x 15'7" piece needs to hang square and lie flat. The back photograph shows even, regular rows and a clean cotton fringe, both marks of a competent loom rather than a hurried one. This is a working Persian rug built for a large room, and it still has years of pile left.