12'9" x 19'4" Persian Mahal Rug | All Over Floral on Navy | 1970s, Perfect Condition

Rugs this big are made on purpose, never by accident. A loom had to be built wide enough to carry 153 inches of warp, and two or three weavers had to sit shoulder to shoulder for years to finish it. This 1970s Mahal measures 12'9" x 19'4", covers roughly 246 square feet, and still carries a full 3/8" wool pile with no thin areas, no repairs and no restoration. The drawing is a continuous floral repeat on a deep indigo ground, framed by a wide ivory lotus border, and it belongs in the small group of genuinely oversize Persian rugs that can fill a great room, a library or a banquet-length dining room without a seam or a filler border. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity naming origin, age, materials and size.

Design and Motifs

The field runs as an uninterrupted floral repeat with no medallion, the format collectors call an all over drawing, and it is the reason a rug of this length reads as calm rather than busy. Broad serrated palmettes alternate with split leaf forms and fan-shaped blossoms, each pair joined by thin arcing vines that carry small feathered leaves and single rosettes. The repeat mirrors left to right across the center line, so every motif has a twin, and it steps up the length of the rug in staggered rows that the eye follows from one end to the other. The main border is the piece's signature: large ivory cartouches holding a stylized lotus with a solid salmon triangle at its heart, separated by facing leaf sprays and dotted with small navy teardrops. Two flanking guard stripes carry a running meander of four petal rosettes in navy and rust, and a final narrow navy outer stripe closes the composition. You can see the same border logic on the classic all over floral Persian rugs of the period, drawn here at a generous village scale that suits the size.

A Deep Indigo Field Lit by Ivory and Salmon

The ground is a saturated indigo navy that shifts with the nap, reading almost black where the pile leans away and a clear midnight blue where it leans toward you. Against it the florals are worked in a warm range of creams, buttery golds and pale wheat, with salmon and soft coral used for the heart of each palmette and for the vine junctions, so the warm tones travel down the length of the rug in a steady rhythm. Pale celadon and a cooler sage green appear inside the leaf forms and give the drawing depth without introducing a fourth dominant color. The main border switches the balance completely: an ivory to light straw ground with salmon outlining and small navy accents, which frames the dark field and keeps 19 feet of navy from feeling heavy. Fine navy outlines around every motif hold the whole palette together, and the abrash across the field is gentle and natural, the mark of hand-dyed wool rather than machine consistency.

Mahal Weaving in the Sultanabad District

Mahal rugs come from the cluster of villages around Sultanabad, modern Arak, in west-central Persia, an area that has produced large-format floor rugs for more than a century. The weave is a village weave on a cotton foundation: a strong, honest knot count rather than a workshop-fine one, with a thick wool pile that is built for traffic and gets better looking as it burnishes. That wool is the real story here. Local flocks give a long, glossy staple that takes indigo and madder deeply and holds a sheen you can see in every angled photograph of this piece. Because the loom width dictates everything, a 12'9" x 19'4" Mahal was a deliberate commission, set up for a specific large room, and surviving examples in perfect condition with full pile are far scarcer than the 9x12 and 10x14 sizes that came out of the same district. Fifty years on, this one has the density and the color that a new rug simply cannot fake.