12' x 22' Persian Kerman Rug | Ivory Open Field with Sky Blue Floral Borders | Palace Size

This is a true palace piece: 12' x 22' of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the Kerman tradition of southeast Persia with an open ivory field and a wide sky blue flowering border. The proportions are what make it uncommon. At 264" long and 144" wide it fills a great room, a long formal dining room or a banquet space where most oversized rugs still come up short, and the quiet field means the scale reads as calm rather than busy. The pile stands at 3/8", even from end to end, and the condition is excellent with the original hand-tied fringe intact at both ends. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kerman formula of a plain center ground framed by growing things. A single elongated medallion sits at the middle of the field, built not from solid panels but from a lattice of fine leaf scrolls and small flower heads, with a small lobed rosette at its exact center and a pointed finial reaching out toward each end of the rug. Above and below it, detached floral sprays step out onto the open ivory ground like cut bouquets set down on linen, getting smaller as they move away from the medallion. The field corners are filled with dense bouquets of roses, buds and serrated leaves that lean inward, and the main border runs a continuous flowering vine with palmettes at the corner turns. Outside that sits a scalloped salmon band and then a plain ivory outer stripe carrying small upright flower sprigs, a three-part border system that keeps a 22 foot length from looking bare. The pictorial, garden-inspired border work seen here is the signature Kerman move, and the close-up photographs show how finely each individual stem and petal is outlined.

The Ivory and Sky Blue Palette

The field is ivory, warm rather than stark, closer to unbleached wool than to white, and it takes up most of the rug's surface. Against it the border ground reads as a soft sky blue, muted and slightly greyed, the kind of blue that sits comfortably with pale walls and dark wood. Inside both border and medallion, the flowers are drawn in dusty rose, salmon and a few clear cherry reds, with olive and sage greens for the leafwork and small accents of deeper indigo in the flower centers that give the pattern its definition from across the room. The scalloped inner band pulls that salmon out into a single ribbon of color, which is the one warm line running the full perimeter. Overall this is a light, pastel reading of Persian design rather than a red and navy one, so it works where a saturated rug would dominate. It belongs in the family of ivory and beige Persian rugs that decorators reach for when the furniture is meant to be the loudest thing in the room.

Kerman Weaving and Quality

Kerman sits in the southeast of Persia and has one of the longest unbroken workshop traditions in the country, known above all for floral drawing and for its pale, light-ground room-size pieces. Weavers there worked on tall vertical looms with the design read from a cartoon, which is how a field this wide stays square and how the two ends of the medallion mirror each other across 22 feet. The wool is soft and takes dye evenly, which is why Kerman palettes lean toward these chalky pastels instead of hard primaries, and the asymmetric knot on a cotton warp gives the fine curved outlines visible in the border vine. A plain field is also the harder thing to weave well: there is nowhere to hide an uneven beat-down, and this one lies flat and consistent. Collectors judging where a light-ground Kerman like this falls in the tradition usually start with the wear pattern, the fringe and the dye behavior, the same markers described in our guide on how to date an Oriental rug.