11'8" x 14'9" Persian Sarouk Rug | Semi-Antique Red Open Field Medallion | Excellent Condition

A rug at 11'8" x 14'9" was woven for one purpose: to carry a large formal room from wall to wall, and this semi-antique Sarouk does it with an almost empty red field and a single medallion holding the center. Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, the pile stands a full 3/8" and has kept its body all the way to the edges, which is why the condition reads excellent rather than merely good. The open ground is the hardest thing a weaver can attempt, because there is no pattern to hide behind: the wool has to be clean, evenly spun and evenly dyed across 14 feet of length, and here it is. Buyers who have been looking through oversize Persian rugs and finding mostly busy all-over designs will notice immediately how much calmer a piece this large feels when the field is left to breathe. If you want the background on the weave and the market history, our guide to Persian Sarouk rugs covers it in detail. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity identifying origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Sarouk formula worked at generous scale. A large oval reserve of plain red fills the middle of the rug, and at its center sits a lobed floral medallion with 4 sharp lateral points and a slender pendant finial reaching toward each end. Inside the medallion a navy core holds rose and coral blossoms, curling serrated leaves and small vine scrolls, all packed tightly enough that the detail holds up in close view. The 4 corners carry heavy floral spandrels built from palmettes, cypress-like leaf forms and rosettes on scrolling stems, and their inner edge is cut into the field with a serrated outline that frames the oval. The main border is a navy ground carrying alternating palmettes and full-face rosettes linked by a continuous vine, flanked on both sides by rose guard stripes of small blossoms and a fine ivory minor stripe that separates border from field. Ends finish in the original ivory cotton fringe.

A Deep Red Field Against Navy, Green Blue and Ivory

Color is what sells this rug in person. The field is a deep tomato red that shifts toward brick where the light rakes across the pile and toward a darker wine tone when viewed from the opposite end, a directional quality that only good wool produces. The main border is a true dark navy, almost inky, which pushes the red forward and gives the whole rug a defined outline on a light floor. Between the two sit the accent colors: a distinctive green blue, somewhere between teal and sage, used on the large leaves and on several of the border rosettes, a softer salmon rose that repeats through the guard stripes and the medallion blossoms, and ivory used sparingly for outlining, for small flower heads and for the thin separating stripes. A few touches of pale gold and old blue appear inside the medallion. There is no harshness anywhere in the palette; the reds and roses have mellowed to the settled, slightly smoky range that buyers look for in a semi-antique piece, and the ivory has aged to cream rather than white.

Sarouk: The Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of west central Persia, in the same weaving belt that produced Sultanabad and Farahan work, and from the early 20th century onward its looms were aimed squarely at large formal Western rooms. That is exactly the tradition this rug comes from. The construction is the reason Sarouks earned their reputation: a stout cotton foundation, the asymmetric Persian knot pulled tight, and a heavy wool pile left at about 3/8", which gives a rug that feels substantial underfoot and resists crushing in traffic lanes for generations. The reverse, shown against a ruler in the last photograph, reads as an even, regular grid of knot rows with no pulling, no crooked runs and no patching, and the selvages and both ends are intact. Village and small-town weaving of this type is valued for durability and honest handwork rather than for miniature-fine knot counts, and after decades of service this one still shows full even pile across all 14'9" of its length.