12'5" x 18'2" Persian Kerman Rug | Ruby Red Floral Medallion | Lavar Style Palace Size

At 12'5" x 18'2", this Kerman is a genuine palace piece, wide enough to carry a full seating group and long enough to run the length of a formal room without a break in the drawing. The ruby red field is filled edge to edge with detached flowering sprays that lean inward toward a single ivory and navy medallion, and the weaver held the scale of those sprays steady across more than 18 feet, which is the hardest thing to do on a loom this wide. The pile is fine wool on a cotton foundation, still even and full-bodied, and the condition is excellent with the original ivory fringe intact at both ends. Pieces in this class belong with other oversize 12x18 Persian rugs, and like every rug we import, it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a small elongated medallion with an ivory ground and a navy cartouche core, ringed by a scrolling gold vine and finished top and bottom with lobed pendants. Around it the open red ground carries dozens of separate bouquets: full-blown roses, 8 petal rosettes, tight blue forget-me-not clusters, curling serrated leaves and slender cypress-like leaf sprays, each one drawn as an individual unit rather than tied into a continuous lattice. That detached spray layout is the classic Lavar style of Kerman drawing. The 4 corners are filled with deep scalloped spandrels of pale green and ivory, packed so densely with palmettes and vinery that they read almost as a second field. The main border is a wide navy band of alternating palmettes and green rosette panels, flanked by a rust floral stripe on the outside and a turquoise guard stripe on the inside, with a fine reciprocal minor guard framing the whole.

A Ruby Field Framed in Green and Navy

Red is the anchor here, a true ruby with a faint warm abrash that moves across the width and proves the wool was dyed in batches by hand. Against it the weaver worked an unusually broad palette: soft gold and apricot outline nearly every flower head, ivory and cream carry the medallion and spandrels, and the greens run from sage through pistachio to a cooler olive in the corner fill. The navy of the main border is deep enough to read almost black in the wide photographs, while the guard stripe beside it is a clear turquoise, a colour Kerman weavers use better than anyone. Scattered through the sprays are rose pink, salmon, powder blue, cinnamon and small touches of aubergine. In a room with warm wood or stone, the red carries the floor and the green borders keep it from going heavy.

Kerman Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the southeast of Persia and has been a workshop city, not a village weaving area, for centuries. Its reputation rests on two things: unusually soft local wool that takes dye with real depth, and a drawing tradition detailed enough for pictorial and garden borders that other towns simply do not attempt. Lavar, the finer grade of Kerman work named for the weaving town north of the city, is where the detached floral spray layout seen here was perfected. Technically these are asymmetric knots on a cotton foundation with multiple wefts, which gives a heavy, flat-lying handle that suits a piece of this length. Weaving a room this large demands a full-size loom, a cartoon planned across the entire 18 feet, and a team working side by side for the better part of 2 years, which is why oversize Kermans in even pile and excellent condition are far scarcer than the standard 9x12 sizes.