12' x 15' Persian Sarouk Rug | All Over Floral Sprays | 1930s Antique in Excellent Condition

Roughly 90 years of floor life have done this 12' x 15' Persian Sarouk nothing but good. The mahogany burgundy ground still reads as wine rather than brown, the wool has taken on the quiet sheen that only decades of walking and cleaning produce, and the pile is even from end to end with no thin runs and no patch of open foundation anywhere on the back. It is a genuine room size piece for a formal living room, a long dining table or a library, and it sits squarely in the small pool of honest oversize Persian rugs that survive from the 1930s in this kind of shape. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, age, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The field carries the classic detached bouquet layout, an all over floral design built from separate sprays, footed vases, serrated leaves and curling palmettes that repeat in staggered rows and mirror across the long axis. Look closely at the close-up photographs and you can read the drawing properly: small navy vases outlined in ivory, 8 petal rosettes in rose and sky blue, and long feathered leaves that bend back on themselves. The main border is a navy band of large palmettes and rose blossoms joined by a thin vine, framed on both sides by an unusual olive green guard stripe that gives the whole rug its period signature, with narrow reciprocal minor bands and a plain burgundy selvage finishing the edge.

The Burgundy, Navy and Olive Palette

The ground is a deep mahogany burgundy, closer to oxblood in the shaded photographs and to true wine where the light hits with the pile. Against it the ornament is drawn in ink navy, ivory, soft rose, salmon pink, olive and a cooler sage green, with small hits of sky blue, teal and apricot ochre inside the flower heads that keep the whole surface from going heavy. The border flips the balance: navy takes the ground, and the rose and ivory palmettes come forward, with the chartreuse olive guard band acting as the bright line between border and field. It is a warm, saturated palette that works with walnut and mahogany furniture, brass, oxblood leather and cream walls, and the many-colored detail means it also carries a modern room without looking like a period reproduction.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village near Arak in the Sultanabad district of central Persia, and by the 1930s its looms were the most respected source of heavy, densely knotted room size weaving in the country. The recipe is simple and hard to copy: a stout cotton foundation, a thick well packed wool pile and local fleece with enough lanolin to keep taking light for generations, which is why Persian Sarouk rugs of this period are still the workhorses of old American houses. The back of this one, shown in the fold and reverse photographs, is tight and regular across all 4 corners with straight sides and honest hand-finished ends, exactly the construction you use to date an antique Oriental rug to the interwar workshops rather than to a later copy.