12' x 22' Persian Kerman Rug | Open Burgundy Field with Ivory Medallion | Palace Size Floral

This is a true palace piece: 12' x 22' of hand-knotted wool laid out as one uninterrupted burgundy field, with a single ivory and sky blue medallion floating dead center and a wide floral border framing the whole thing. Rugs at this scale are rarely woven with this much restraint, and the empty field is the point, letting the deep wine ground carry the room while the drawing stays concentrated in the medallion, the scalloped corner spandrels and the border. The pile is a plush 3/8 inch wool on a cotton foundation, heavy enough to lie dead flat under full furniture in a great room, ballroom or long formal dining space. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and like all of our oversize Persian rugs, it travels free to all 50 states despite the freight weight.

Design and Motifs

The composition is classic Kerman open field. A tall lobed medallion sits at the center, built from tight arabesque scrollwork and small naturalistic blossoms, and it tapers at both ends into long pendants that break into loose bouquets of roses, bellflowers and buds. Those pendants are the detail worth studying up close: the drawing is curvilinear all the way through, with no angular shortcuts, and the flowers are shaded petal by petal rather than blocked in flat. The four corners answer the medallion with scalloped spandrels of acanthus scrollwork and cascading flower sprays that spill a short distance into the burgundy ground before stopping. Everything between is left open, which is exactly why the field reads so calm at 22 feet long. The main border runs a continuous vine of palmettes, rosettes and leafy meanders, flanked by narrow guard stripes of small repeating flower heads, and the whole border system is drawn to the same standard as the medallion rather than being simplified as filler.

Color Palette

The field is a saturated burgundy that leans toward wine and raspberry where the light catches the pile, and darkens to near claret where the nap runs the other way. Against it the medallion works in a pale sky blue ground with ivory, cream and soft gold arabesques, picked out with dusty rose and small touches of olive and mustard in the flower centers. The spandrels shift to cream and buttery gold, and the border moves into a soft sage and celadon green with a salmon rose inner band, which is the combination that makes Kerman weaving instantly recognizable and unusually easy to live with. Nothing in the palette is harsh: the greens are muted, the blues are powder rather than navy, and the golds have aged to a honey tone. Together the cool border and the warm red field give the rug its balance, so it sits comfortably with mahogany and walnut antiques but also with a modern room built around cream, brass and stone.

Kerman Origin and Weaving Quality

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeastern Persia and has been a center of fine floor weaving for centuries, known above all for pictorial garden borders and for the curvilinear floral style seen here. Kerman weavers work on a cotton warp and weft with a long single weft shot that gives their rugs the characteristic supple handle, and they use a soft, high-luster local wool that takes shaded dyeing well, which is what makes the petal-by-petal color work in the medallion possible. A rug of this size is a loom project measured in years, requiring a workshop-scale loom and several weavers working shoulder to shoulder from a single cartoon, with the pattern carried perfectly from one end to the other across 22 feet. The back shows a fine, even knot with crisp definition in the guard stripes, and the pile has been left at a full 3/8 inch. If you want to understand how pieces like this are placed in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we use here.