11'6" x 19'6" Persian Kerman Rug | Open Ivory Field, Sage Green Floral Border | 1950s Oversize

This is a genuine palace piece from the 1950s, 11'6" x 19'6" of hand-knotted Kerman wool on a cotton foundation, and the sort of rug that was woven for a specific room rather than for stock. The drawing is confident and quiet: a single floral medallion floating near the center of a wide open beige field, a soft ivory oval halo pulled around it by a ring of dense flowering vine, and a deep sage green border holding the whole composition in place. Nearly 20 feet of length means very few of these survive in one piece with an even, unworn pile, and this one has it. Among oversize Persian rugs in this pastel palette, an open field of this scale is unusual, because it leaves the weaver nowhere to hide. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed floral medallion built in layers: a pale coral cartouche with cusped ends, an 8 petal rosette at its heart, small blue forget-me-nots and green sprays radiating outward, and a scrolling terracotta vine wrapping the whole form. Above and below it hang two pendant finials, drawn in the same vocabulary but at a quarter of the scale. Rather than fill the field, the weaver let it breathe, then anchored the emptiness with a great oval wreath of blossoming vine that reads almost like a garland laid on the floor. The 4 corners carry generous spandrels of the same flowering vine, so the eye never loses the frame. The main border is a classic Kerman garden band: large acanthus leaves, full roses, palmettes and curling tendrils marching continuously around the rug, flanked by narrow guard stripes of light blue and coral arabesque. Close up, as in the corner and pile detail photographs, you can see how fine the outlining is, single-knot lines of brown and blue drawing the leaf edges, which is what keeps a design this curvilinear from going soft.

The Beige, Sage and Terracotta Palette

Beige is the governing color here, a warm sandy beige in the open field that photographs closer to ivory and cream where the light catches the nap. Against it, the border runs a muted sage green, dusty rather than bright, the kind of green Kerman workshops reached through vegetal dye and long-settled wool. Terracotta orange does the drawing work throughout, from rust-toned leaves in the border to the coral vine around the medallion, and it shifts from a soft apricot in the highlights to a deeper brick in the outlines. Light blue appears in small controlled doses, in the palmettes at the corners, in the little florets inside the medallion, and along the inner guard stripes, and it is what keeps the warm tones from turning monotone. Pink blossoms and clean ivory grounds fill the spandrels and the outer guard band. The overall effect is pale and pastel rather than saturated, which is exactly why rugs from this period read so well in light rooms with limestone, oak or pale plaster, and why buyers searching for a beige and green oversize floor rug tend to stop on Kerman.

Kerman: Weaving Town and Quality

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a workshop city, not a village weaving area, for centuries. Its looms were built long and wide because its clients were palaces, embassies and grand houses, which is why oversize formats like this 11'6" x 19'6" exist at all from this district. Kerman weavers use a fine asymmetrical knot on a cotton warp and weft, with several wefts between knot rows, producing a rug that lies dead flat and holds a crisp curved line. Pictorial garden borders are the signature of the city, and you can see the descendant of that tradition in the rose and acanthus band framing this piece. The wool is local and unusually lustrous, which is why the pile still has sheen after seven decades and why the colors mellowed instead of dulling. If you want to understand the visual clues that place a piece in this era, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through dyes, drawing and back structure, all of which point here to mid-century Kerman workshop production.