11'3" x 16'3" Persian Isfahan Rug | Red Field with Navy Blue Border | Central Floral Medallion

This is a genuine room filler: 11'3" x 16'3" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, drawn in the classic Isfahan manner with a single crowned medallion floating on a clear red ground. The pile is close cropped and even from end to end, the drawing holds its curve through every vine and tendril, and the wool still carries the soft sheen that good central Persian fleece keeps for decades. It reads as a formal piece without feeling stiff, largely because the red is warm rather than hard and the blues are layered in three distinct tones. At this scale it belongs in a room where furniture sits fully on the rug, and buyers shopping oversize Persian rugs in the 11x16 range will know how rarely one turns up in this condition. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 petal rosette set inside an ivory star, ringed by a navy cartouche band and then by a scalloped blue corona that throws out feathered lanceolate leaves in every direction. Above and below it, twin pendants rise into slender finials that reach toward the ends of the field. Around all of that runs a continuous arabesque: ivory vine stems that loop and cross without a break, carrying palmettes, split leaves, lotus heads and small cupped blossoms in two blues, wine red, cream and touches of olive. The 4 corners are filled with pale sage green spandrels that carry their own floral clusters plus small fretted latch hook devices, giving the eye a cool break before the border begins. The main border is a deep blue band of large scrolling boteh, each one packed with red and ivory blossom work, and it is framed on both sides by narrow ivory guard stripes of running vine and by a thin blue inner stripe. Nothing in the layout is filler; every stem resolves into a flower.

Reading the Red and Blue

The field red is a true madder-toned crimson with a slight warmth to it, deep enough to anchor a large room but never brown or muddy, and it stays consistent across the full 16'3" length. Against it the weaver worked a full ladder of blues: a dark navy that outlines the medallion and fills the main border, a mid indigo used for palmette bodies, and a soft powder blue that lights up the feathered leaves and the outer rays of the medallion. Ivory does the structural work, drawing every vine and every outline so the pattern stays legible from across the room, while pale sage green in the spandrels and the corner clusters cools the whole composition down. Smaller notes appear on close inspection: wine red flower centers, olive green leaf tips, and a mustard gold that shows up only in the tiny calyx of certain blossoms. The overall impression from a standing position is red and blue; up close it is far more varied than that.

Isfahan Weaving in Central Persia

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving center since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century, when royal patronage set the standards the town still works to. The reputation of Persian Isfahan rugs rests on drawing rather than decoration: the curved line, the unbroken vine, the perfectly balanced medallion. That kind of precision only survives at a high knot count, which is why Isfahan weavers work on a tight cotton warp and clip the wool pile low, so the pattern stays crisp instead of blurring into the nap. You can see it here in the way the ivory vine keeps an even width through every turn and in how cleanly the boteh in the border resolve at the corners, which is where a weaker weaver gives themselves away. Producing a piece this large to that drawing discipline is a long loom commitment, and it is the reason oversize examples in this design are far scarcer than the 8x10 and 9x12 sizes.