11'7" x 13'11" Persian Tabriz Rug | Olive Herati All Over Field | Estate Piece, Excellent Condition

This is an estate Persian Tabriz that came out of a private home with its pile still full and its sides and ends straight. The ground is a warm olive that shifts toward camel and gold as the light moves across it, and the whole field is covered edge to edge with small rosettes, palmettes and thin vine work rather than a single central medallion. Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, it measures 11'7" x 13'11", large enough to carry an entire living room or a formal dining table with the chairs pulled back, and it is one of the more usable pieces in our group of oversize Persian rugs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn as a continuous all over repeat in the Herati tradition, the pattern Tabriz weavers call mahi. Read it closely and you find the same unit repeating in staggered rows: an 8 petal rosette at the centre, a diamond of fine vine around it, and curling leaves turning back on themselves at each of the 4 corners. Between those rows sit larger star rosettes in navy and rust, and tall arched sprays that read almost like cypress forms rising from the baseline, clearest in the corner close-up. The main border carries alternating turtle palmettes and cusped cartouches on a terracotta ground, with a bold navy blossom anchoring the centre of each corner. Flanking it are narrow guard stripes in pale green and ivory filled with running leaf and star heads, and a plain camel outer edge that frames the whole thing quietly. The corners resolve cleanly, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon rather than a village improvisation, and because there is no medallion you can place furniture anywhere on the field without cutting the composition in half.

Olive, Camel and Terracotta Across the Field

The dominant tone is a muted olive, dry and slightly golden rather than green, and it moves through camel and pale honey in gentle bands where the wool was dyed in separate lots. Against that ground the detail work is where the colour lives: inky navy in the star rosettes and the outlined leaves, a soft brick and salmon terracotta in the smaller blossoms, chalky ivory in the petal tips and the tiny four point flowers, and a dusty sea green that appears through the vine work and the guard stripes. The main border shifts to a warmer brick terracotta that lifts the whole perimeter and pulls the eye outward, with cream and olive palmettes floating on it and navy used sparingly for weight. Nothing here is loud. This is an earth tone rug that sits comfortably with oak and walnut floors, camel and cream upholstery, brass and aged leather, and it will not fight artwork or wallpaper. Under warm lamplight the field reads gold; in daylight the olive and the green accents come forward.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia, in Azarbaijan province, and has been the country's most organised weaving city for centuries. Its workshops measure fineness in Raj, the count of knots per gereh across the width, and they built their reputation on disciplined cartoon drawing and a firm, flat handle that holds a room size rug dead square over 14 feet of length. You can see that discipline on the back of this piece, where the cotton warps are evenly spaced and the knot rows run true from selvage to selvage, with no drift in the pattern where the weavers changed shifts. The wool has the dry lustre that comes from decades of use and care rather than from a finish, and the pile is even from end to end with the fringes intact. For anyone weighing up how old a piece like this might be, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we use: foundation, dye behaviour, wear pattern and the way the ends are finished.