12' x 15'5" Tabriz Mahi Design Rug | Burgundy Herati Fish Field | Wool & Silk, Made in India

This is a big, serious room rug: 12' x 15'5" of hand-knotted wool with silk accents, drawn in the Tabriz Mahi idiom and woven in India by a workshop that clearly knows the pattern inside out. The field is a deep burgundy carrying an all over herati fish lattice, anchored by a scalloped ivory medallion with a black inner diamond, and framed by an unusually deep stack of guard stripes that ends in an ivory palmette border. It covers a full dining suite or a large great room, and at this footprint it belongs in the oversize rug group where size, not style, is the deciding factor. Never used, in perfect condition, and shipped with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is a genuine hand-knotted piece.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the whole field is built from the herati unit: a small rosette inside a diamond, flanked by 4 curved leaves that read as fish circling the center. Here the lattice runs edge to edge in tight repeats, with tiny white cross-shaped flowerheads scattered through it that make the burgundy ground shimmer at a distance. The center holds a scalloped ivory medallion with a black lobed diamond inside it and a small ivory rosette at its heart, extended top and bottom by stepped pendants. Four ivory spandrels sweep out to the corners, each one closed off by a black triangular corner panel that repeats the same herati drawing in a darker key. The border system is the other headline: 12 concentric stripes of alternating ivory, camel and gray, each carrying its own miniature vine, boteh or rosette run, with a wide ivory main border of red palmettes and paired cream blossoms on a curling vine. The drawing stays clean and symmetrical across a 15'5" length, which is the hard part at this scale.

The Burgundy, Black and Ivory Palette

The field is a deep wine burgundy, warm rather than blue-red, and it darkens or lifts depending on pile direction, which is why the angled photographs look richer than the flat overhead shot. Against it the herati lattice is picked out in camel, olive-brown, soft slate blue and chalk white, so the ground never reads as a solid block of red. The medallion and spandrels are a creamy undyed ivory with silk highlights that catch light along the scalloped outlines, and the black used inside the medallion and in the 4 corner panels gives the composition its weight and stops the ivory from floating. In the borders the palette widens: brick red palmettes, pale rose and buff flowerheads, gray-green leaves, small pops of gold and pale blue, all on ivory and camel grounds. The selvage and outer edge are finished in a solid burgundy that frames the whole thing, and the fringe is natural ivory cotton. It is a traditional red and cream scheme, but the gray-blues and olives keep it from feeling heavy in a modern room.

Made in India: Weaving Quality Behind This Tabriz Mahi Design

India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and this piece is a fair example of why: the knotting is even, the horizontal rows stay straight across a 12 foot width, and the herati repeat holds its proportions from one end of the rug to the other instead of drifting, which is what happens when a workshop rushes an oversize loom. The back shown in the final photograph tells the story clearly, with fine, tightly packed knots on a cotton foundation and crisp color changes in the border stripes, the sort of definition that only comes from a high count of knots per square inch. The wool is springy with a low, dense clip, and the silk is used sparingly, reserved for the medallion outlines and border highlights where it earns its keep. If you are weighing how a piece like this differs from a village or city weave in Persia, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from a broader Oriental rug lays out the distinction honestly.