13'6" x 20'7" Oversize Persian Tabriz Rug | Sheik Safi Medallion | 60 Raj Wool and Silk

At 13'6" x 20'7" this is a room-defining piece, the scale that only a workshop with a 20 foot loom and a team of weavers can produce. The design is the famous Sheik Safi drawing, a 16 point star medallion hung with pendants and lamps over an ivory field of flowering vine, worked here in wool with a touch of silk on a cotton foundation at roughly 400 knots per square inch. It is a rug for a ballroom, a great room or a long formal salon, and it belongs with the genuinely oversize Persian rugs that are almost impossible to find in perfect, unused condition. Woven in the 2000's and never laid in a home, it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The Sheik Safi drawing descends from the great 16th century shrine carpet, and it is judged entirely on how cleanly the weaver holds the geometry across a field this long. Here the center carries a 16 point star medallion filled with its own miniature vine scroll and crowned by a small wine rosette, ringed by 16 pendant cartouches in wine, sage and apricot, with a tall lamp pendant suspended at each end of the long axis. The field around it is a continuous all over arabesque: thin coiling vines, palmettes, serrated leaves and small blossoms drawn in 4 mirrored quarters, so the pattern reads the same from either end of the room. Each of the 4 corners repeats a quarter of the medallion, which is the detail that separates a true Sheik Safi from a generic medallion rug. The main border runs a sequence of elongated cartouches alternating with round rosette medallions, flanked by 2 palmette guard stripes and an outer band of reciprocal florals.

A Palette Built on Ivory, Gold and Deep Green

The field is a warm ivory that shifts toward soft champagne gold where the light rakes across the pile, and it is the perfect ground for the fine outline work: vines in tobacco brown and camel, blossoms in wine, rose, brick and dusty pink, leaves in sage and olive, and tiny florets in sky blue and navy that keep the whole field from going flat. The central medallion is a rich camel gold, darker and more saturated than the field, with a burgundy core and pale celadon outlining. The main border reverses everything, a deep forest green ground carrying salmon and apricot cartouches, ivory palmettes and navy detailing, with a golden caramel outer band and ivory guards to frame the edges. The overall effect is a warm neutral rug that sits easily beside cream, rust, walnut and brass, which is why buyers looking through ivory and beige Persian rugs keep returning to this palette.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz in northwest Persia measures fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. 40 Raj is commercial work, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, the grade of this rug, is roughly 400 knots per square inch and the point at which a Tabriz workshop can hold a curved line without breaking it into steps. You can see the payoff in the vine tips and the outlining of the pendant cartouches, which stay smooth rather than jagged. The pile is wool with a touch of silk, the silk used as highlight so that certain blossoms and the medallion field catch light differently as you walk around the rug, and the foundation is cotton, which is what keeps a 20 foot loom piece square and stable. The close photographs show a full, even pile, tight symmetrical knotting on the back, and original hand-tied ivory fringe, all consistent with a piece that has been stored rather than used.