12' x 18'6" Oversize Mahi Tabriz Design Rug | Wool & Silk Herati Fish Pattern | Ruby Red & Black

This is a true palace piece: 12' x 18'6" of hand-knotted wool and silk drawn in the Mahi Tabriz idiom, with an ivory diamond medallion floating in a ruby red field of miniature Herati rosettes. Pieces at this scale are rarely woven, and rarer still in perfect, never used condition with the pile standing full and even from fringe to fringe. The silk sits in the small flowers and outlines, catching light as you walk past, while the wool carries the weight underfoot. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, materials and measurements, and it belongs in the very small group of oversize rugs that can actually fill a ballroom-scale room without looking stretched.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the Herati unit at the heart of the drawing: a small rosette inside a diamond, flanked by 4 curved lanceolate leaves that old weavers read as fish circling a pond. That unit repeats thousands of times across the field in a perfectly aligned lattice, which is the hardest thing to hold over 18'6" of length. The center carries a stepped ivory diamond medallion filled with its own miniature Herati grid, ringed by a black cusped outline and finished with slender black pendants above and below. Four corner spandrels in soft blue-grey and salmon repeat the same lattice at a different scale, so the whole composition reads as one continuous all over pattern rather than a medallion dropped onto plain ground. The wide black main border runs a vine of palmettes and ivory-centered rosettes, framed on both sides by 6 narrow guard stripes of salmon, sage and pale blue floral bands, each one drawn cleanly enough to hold its own detail at arm's length.

A Ruby Red Field Against Black and Ivory

The field is a deep ruby red that shifts toward wine in shade and toward a warmer cherry where the light hits the silk. It is not a flat color: the Herati tracery laid over it in ivory, teal green, slate blue and soft rose breaks the surface into thousands of small color events, so the red reads rich rather than heavy. The medallion is ivory verging on cream, the single brightest passage in the rug, and its black surround gives it the contrast that makes it visible from across a large room. The spandrels cool the composition down with pale blue-grey and dusty salmon, and the same salmon reappears in the guard stripes, tying border to corners. Accent notes of forest green and cornflower blue sit in the rosette centers, visible in the close detail photographs. The main border is a true black, which frames the ruby field cleanly and makes this an easy rug to work with alongside dark wood, brass, cream plaster walls or a deep neutral sofa.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was made in Pakistan, one of the few places still turning out hand-knotted work of this fineness at palace scale, and the workshops there have carried the Mahi Tabriz drawing for decades with real fidelity to the original cartoons. The back, shown in the detail photographs, is tight and legible, each knot distinct on a cotton foundation, with straight selvages and hand-finished cotton fringe at both ends. Wool gives the pile its body and resilience; the silk is used selectively in the small floral elements and outlines, which is where it earns its keep visually instead of being scattered for show. The fineness of the weave is what allows the Herati lattice to stay this small and this regular over 222 inches of length, and a weave this dense is also what makes an Oriental rug of this class hold up under decades of traffic. If you are shopping the 12 x 18 oversize range, note that this one ships free anywhere in the 50 states despite its weight.