12'4" x 16'2" Persian Heriz Serapi Rug | Coral Field with Navy Geometric Medallion | Oversize

This is a big, confident room anchor: 12'4" x 16'2" of hand-knotted wool in the Serapi manner, with a coral apricot field that has the slight movement of hand-spun yarn and a deep indigo medallion sitting dead center. The drawing is all straight lines and clean angles, the way the Heriz villages have always drawn, and the pile is thick enough to take a dining table, a sofa grouping or a full library without flattening. It belongs in the class of oversize Persian rugs that are genuinely difficult to find in this condition, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a navy stepped medallion built on a diamond, with 4 squared cartouches at its shoulders and long sawtooth arms running out to either side. Inside it a pale sage cypress rises on the vertical axis, and at the very heart sits a small coral and blue rosette, the detail shown close up in the photographs. Anchor pendants drop above and below, finishing in serrated leaf tips. The coral field around the medallion is not empty: hooked vine work, small angular palmettes, blue cross forms and scattered blossoms fill it at a deliberate rhythm, the calling card of well-drawn geometric Persian rugs. Sage spandrels close the 4 corners, each carrying its own vine and rosette drawing, and the indigo main border repeats a stepped lozenge alternating with a 4 petal coral rosette between narrow ivory guard stripes.

A Coral, Indigo and Sage Palette

The field is the reason to buy this rug. It reads as a warm coral, somewhere between apricot and soft terracotta, and because the wool was spun by hand it shifts a shade lighter or deeper as you walk around it, most visible in the open areas above and below the medallion. Against that warmth the medallion and border are a saturated indigo navy, the darkest value in the rug and the element that gives the whole floor its structure. Between the two sits the pale sage green of the spandrels, a cool celadon that lifts the corners and keeps the coral from going heavy. Gold and camel carry the outer band and the minor borders, ivory outlines nearly every motif so the geometry stays legible from across a room, and small touches of cocoa brown and light sky blue turn up in the vine work and the border rosettes. It is a warm rug that still works with blue upholstery, dark woods and stone.

Heriz Weaving and the Serapi Grade

Heriz is a cluster of villages east of Tabriz in northwest Persia, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan. The water there runs through mineral-rich rock, and the local flocks grow a notoriously tough, high-luster fleece, which is why Heriz rugs are the ones dealers put in the rooms that get used. Weavers work from memory rather than a full cartoon, which is what produces the angular line, the straight-sided medallion and the stepped corners instead of the flowing curve of a city workshop. Serapi is the name the trade gives to the finer, more open and more elegantly drawn end of that tradition, and this piece earns it: the medallion is well proportioned to the field, the spandrels are drawn with real care, and the knotting stays even across nearly 200 square feet, no small feat on a loom this wide. The back shows clean knot definition on a cotton foundation, the selvedges are tight, and the pile has the weight to last generations on the floor.