13' x 19'4" Persian Tabriz Rug | Herati Mahi Allover Design | 60 Raj Wool and Silk, Approx. 400 KPSI

This is a palace piece in the truest sense: 13' x 19'4" of Herati Mahi drawing worked at 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, in wool with silk used through the outlines and the finer floral work. At a little over 250 square feet it belongs in the small group of oversize Persian rugs that can actually fill a great room or a long formal dining space instead of floating in it. Woven in the 2000s, the pile is full and even end to end, the fringes and selvages are intact, and the rug has never been put into service. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is pure Mahi: an unbroken lattice of Herati units, each one a small rosette framed by 4 curved lanceolate leaves, repeated in tight diagonal rows from selvage to selvage. Herati is also called the fish pattern, and at this knot count the leaves read as crisp individual shapes rather than a blur. Floating over that lattice sits a large scalloped medallion, its outline drawn as a chain of cusped arcs, with a slender pendant dropping from each end and a matching pair of quarter medallions worked into the 4 corners as spandrels. The main border carries a procession of big palmettes and cupped rosettes on a serpentine vine, flanked on both sides by a stack of narrow guard stripes of running rosettes, diagonal fretwork and a fine barber pole outer stripe. It is a disciplined, formal drawing with no filler anywhere, which is exactly what separates city workshop weaving from village interpretations of the same pattern.

Ivory and Salmon Color Palette

The ground is ivory, closer to warm cream than white, and the Herati lattice is drawn over it in salmon, soft rose and a dusty taupe brown, with tiny points of navy and pale sky blue at the centers of the rosettes. Read from a standing height, those small salmon knots blend into the ivory and give the whole field a pale blush cast that shifts warmer or cooler as the light moves, which is one of the pleasures of a wool and silk weave at this scale. The medallion reads a shade deeper, a rosewood salmon against a paler halo, and the corner spandrels repeat it. In the border the palette opens up: apricot, coral, celadon green, ivory and small flashes of deep indigo in the palmette hearts. It is a quiet, light rug overall, easy to live with, and it sits comfortably alongside other ivory and beige Persian rugs in a neutral room.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz weavers count fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. 40 Raj is ordinary commercial goods, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, which is where this rug sits, works out to roughly 400 knots per square inch and is the grade serious buyers look for. Reaching that density across a loom 13 feet wide is a different problem from reaching it on a 4x6: the warps have to stay in tension for years, the design has to stay true over 19 feet of length, and several weavers have to work shoulder to shoulder without leaving a seam in the drawing. That is why oversize Mahi pieces at 60 Raj come out of established Tabriz workshops and nowhere else. The cotton foundation keeps the rug flat and dimensionally stable, and the silk carried through the outlines gives the Herati leaves their faint sheen when the light rakes across the pile.