12'3" x 17'10" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Garden Panel Design | Oversize, Brand New

This is a full palace size floor: 12'3" x 17'10" of hand-knotted wool laid out as a walled garden, with roughly 60 separate compartments each holding its own tree or flowering shrub. It has never been used, the pile stands full and even from end to end, and the wool still carries the soft sheen you can see in the close-up photographs. Pieces this large in perfect condition are the hardest part of the market to source, which is why we keep a deep bench of oversize 12x18 Persian rugs rather than a single example. Every rug leaves our Freeport warehouse with a certificate of authenticity documenting its origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a khesti, or brick, layout: rows of softly lobed panels staggered like tiles in a formal garden, each outlined by a fine sawtooth vine. Three motifs rotate through them. The first is a weeping willow drawn in deep aubergine on cream, its branches falling in even tiers. The second is a flowering shrub rising from a single stem, its blossoms opening into blue, rust and ivory florets. The third is a grid of 5 petal rosettes in pink, set out in tidy rows with paired tulips at the top of the panel. Because the compartments shift color from one row to the next, the eye never settles into a repeat, and the 4 corners of the field resolve cleanly into the surround. The border system runs three deep: a wide navy main band of palmettes and rosettes, flanked by ivory guard stripes carrying curled boteh and leafy vine scroll, then a salmon outer stripe that frames the whole rug in warm light.

A Garden Palette of Navy, Burgundy, Cream and Pink

Four colors carry the field. Deep burgundy red reads almost wine dark under the panel outlines, navy blue turns nearly black in some compartments and opens into a clear sapphire in others, cream runs from parchment to soft butter where the willow panels sit, and rose pink supplies the blossoms throughout. Black grounds a handful of panels and sharpens everything beside it. The secondary shades are what make this a genuinely multi-colored Persian rug: rust orange tulips, sage and pine green leaves, powder blue florets and small touches of apricot in the outer guard stripe. Under daylight the wool shows abrash, the gentle banding of hand-dyed yarn, most visibly across the blue panels. It is a palette that sits comfortably with both warm woods and cool grey walls, and it hides traffic well across a large open room.

Bakhtiar Weaving and the Garden Tradition

The Bakhtiar weaving villages sit in the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, in the high country the Bakhtiari tribes have used for generations. Shalamzar, Saman and Chaleshtar are the names collectors look for, and the compartment garden is their signature drawing, a woven version of the walled Persian garden divided into irrigated plots. Bakhtiar weavers work on a cotton foundation with a heavy, tightly packed wool pile, which is exactly why these rugs survive decades of family use and why they are woven in large sizes when other village groups stop at room size. Turn the back over, as in the fold photograph, and the knotting is regular and firm across the full 12'3" width, with the pattern reading clearly from the reverse. That combination of tough construction and garden drawing is the whole appeal of a Bakhtiar made in Persia.