12' x 15' Wool and Silk Oriental Rug | Mahi Tabriz Fish Design | Gray Field | Never Used

At 12' x 15' this is a true palace floor covering, and it is woven in the Mahi idiom, the fish pattern that separates competent workshops from serious ones. The pile is wool with silk worked through the outlines and the lighter highlights, knotted over a cotton foundation, and the drawing holds together at a scale where most all over patterns fall apart: the repeat runs clean from the burgundy border to the black center medallion without drifting. It has never been laid on a floor, and the pile still stands up with the full sheen it left the loom with. Every piece we ship carries a certificate of authenticity. As a hand-knotted Oriental rug of this footprint it will carry a great room or seat a 12 chair dining table with all legs on the wool, which is exactly what buyers shopping oversize rugs at this size are trying to solve.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the small leaf shapes that curl around each rosette in the Herati lattice like fish circling a pond. Here that lattice covers the entire field in a tight, evenly spaced repeat, thousands of identical units built from a diamond vine, a central rosette and 4 curved leaves. Sitting on top of it is a long lobed center medallion with a scalloped salmon outline, an inner cartouche of pale ground filled with the same fish repeat, and a pendant hanging from each end. Two smaller lobed cartouches float above and below on the long axis. The corner spandrels are drawn in deep red and filled with their own version of the lattice, so the design never changes vocabulary, only ground color. The main border carries alternating cream palmette cartouches and rosette medallions linked by curling vines and feathered leaves, and it is framed by 5 narrower guard stripes, the widest of which runs a row of pink 8 petal rosettes on a teal and camel ground.

A Gray Field Worked in Burgundy, Pink and Green

The ground is gray, a cool dove tone that the silk highlights lift toward silver where the light catches. Because the Herati units are knotted in dozens of small colors, the field never reads flat: burgundy and wine rosettes, black outlines, chalk white petals, bottle green leaves and clear pink blossoms all sit inside it, so from standing height the floor looks like a soft pewter haze and from 3 feet away it is a riot of detail. The center medallion is the darkest note in the rug, a near black aubergine that anchors the whole composition, edged in a warm salmon line that is the one genuinely bright color on the field. Around the outside the main border swings to a deep burgundy red, which is what gives the rug its frame and makes the gray look deliberate rather than washed. The guard stripes bring in teal, apricot and hot pink, and those pinks are the detail that makes this piece work against gray walls, plaster tones and cool modern furniture instead of only in a traditional room.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was made in China, on the looms that took over the top end of classical hand-knotted production and now weave the great medallion patterns to standards most commercial workshops cannot touch. The Mahi or fish layout takes its name from the looms of Tabriz, and reproducing it honestly is a test: the repeat has to stay square across 12 feet of width, the medallion has to land dead center, and the leaf shapes have to remain legible at a scale of a few knots each. Turn this one over and the back shows a tight, even grid with the pattern fully articulated on the reverse, the sign of a high knot count rather than a heavy pile hiding loose work. The selvedges are hand overcast in ivory wool, the fringe is the cotton warp itself finished by hand, and the pile has the crisp clipped surface of a rug that was sheared low so the drawing stays sharp. Wool and silk together give it two textures under foot and two levels of light, which is why the field changes as you walk around it.