12'9" x 19'2" Persian Rug | All-Over Floral on Deep Ruby Red | 1980s, Perfect Condition

This is a true palace piece: 12'9" x 19'2" of hand-knotted Persian wool with a deep ruby red field drawn edge to edge in flowering vines, and not a single repeat that reads as machine-like. It dates to the 1980s, and the pile is still full and upright across the whole surface, with clean selvages and original cotton fringe at both ends. Rugs at this scale are almost always woven on commission, because a loom wide enough to hold 12'9" ties up a workshop for years, and that investment shows in the drawing and in the wool, which has the faint sheen of good hand-spun fleece. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity. If you are shopping oversize Persian rugs for a room 15 feet wide or more, this one covers the floor without looking like a compromise.

Design and Motifs

The field carries no central medallion. Instead the weaver filled the entire 19'2" length with an all-over floral design: thin arabesque vines that split and rejoin, broad serrated palmettes, curled acanthus leaves, small 8 petal rosettes and a scattering of paisley boteh forms tucked between the larger blossoms. The drawing is mirrored along both axes, so the pattern reads as ordered from across the room and as endlessly varied when you stand over it. A narrow ivory inner guard separates the field from a wide navy main border, where large pink and ivory palmettes alternate with vase-like sprays on a continuous vine. Outside that sit an ivory vine band and a light blue outer stripe, then a plain ruby red outer edge, so the border stack builds in four distinct steps rather than one heavy band. Corner resolutions are cleanly turned at all 4 corners, which is where careless drawing usually shows first on a rug this large.

A Deep Ruby Red Field With Navy and Sky Blue

The ground is a deep ruby red that leans slightly cool, closer to a ripe cherry than to a brick or rust tone, and it shifts visibly with the nap: darker and richer looking into the pile, brighter and almost rose where the light runs with it. Against that field the palette is cooler than you expect from a red Persian rug. Sky blue and teal do most of the work in the leaves and blossom centers, backed by a true navy in the outlines and the main border, with ivory and cream giving the pattern its structure so nothing muddies. Warm notes are used sparingly and deliberately: soft rose pink in the border palmettes, ochre gold in the leaf tips, a chocolate brown in the vine stems, and small touches of terracotta and green in the rosettes. Among red and burgundy Persian rugs, this one sits on the jewel-toned side rather than the earthy side, which makes it work well with dark wood, brass and navy upholstery.

Persian Weaving, Wool Quality and Age

The rug is asymmetrically knotted by hand on a cotton warp, with a wool pile clipped at a medium height that leaves the fine outlines legible while still giving the surface real body underfoot. The back photograph shows an even, regular knot field with no slubs or abrupt changes in tension, which on a piece 19'2" long means the same hands and the same wool batch stayed with the loom from start to finish. The wool itself is the selling point here and the reason the pile still stands after four decades: dense, springy and lanolin-rich, the kind of natural fleece that burnishes rather than dulls as it is walked on. A 1980s weaving date puts this rug in the last generation of large Persian workshop production before oversize commissions became genuinely scarce, and the tight, unworn handle is consistent with a rug that spent most of its life rolled or lightly used. If you want to understand how weavers, dealers and collectors read age from structure, materials and wear, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same evidence we used on this one.