13' x 19'8" Persian Tabriz Rug | Fine Curvilinear Medallion | Navy & Ivory Oversize

This is a genuine palace piece: 13' x 19'8" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the Tabriz tradition with a drawing fine enough to hold its detail across nearly 256 square feet. Rugs of this scale are usually coarse, because covering that much ground at a high knot count takes years on the loom. This one is not. The ivory medallion at center is filled with hairline vine work, the navy field carries an unbroken all-over floral system, and the green cartouche border keeps its shape right around all 4 sides without the drawing wandering. It arrives in excellent condition with a certificate of authenticity, and as one of the few truly oversize Persian rugs that ships free anywhere in the 50 states, there is no freight surcharge waiting at checkout.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built around a round ivory medallion packed with scrolling arabesque and a small red rosette at its exact center, flanked by stepped pendants that run up and down the long axis. Above and below the medallion sit tall woven vase forms, each spilling curved vines and blossoms back into the field, a court motif that Tabriz designers have kept in their repertoire for generations. The navy ground is covered edge to edge with palmettes, serrated leaves and small cloud-band cartouches, drawn in a continuous curvilinear system rather than a repeating grid, so the eye never finds an obvious seam in the pattern. Ivory spandrels anchor the 4 corners of the field with their own miniature vine work. The main border alternates elongated green cartouches with red and ivory rosette panels, and is framed on both sides by narrow ivory guard stripes carrying a running floral meander. It is a formal, drawn-to-a-cartoon design, and at this scale that discipline is what separates a workshop rug from a village one.

Navy, Ivory and Sage Green in the Palette

The field is a deep navy blue that reads almost black where the pile lies away from the light and warms toward ink blue where it lies with it. Against that ground, the drawing is picked out in ivory, soft gold, sage and brick red, so the pattern glows rather than shouts. The medallion and spandrels are a creamy undyed ivory, the single brightest note in the rug, and they give the whole floor an obvious center. The main border shifts the temperature: its cartouches are a muted sage to olive green, an unusual and very collectible border color for a rug of this size, and the green picks up the scattered leaf work out in the field so the border never feels bolted on. Red appears only in measured doses, in rosette centers, blossom hearts and small palmettes, which keeps the palette cool and formal. Warm oak or walnut floors, cream plaster, brass and dark leather all sit naturally with this color scheme.

Tabriz Weaving and Workshop Quality

Tabriz, in the northwest of Persia, is the country's oldest continuous weaving center and the one place where the loom, the designer's cartoon and the dye house have always worked as a single operation. Fineness there is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the quality of the curve in a drawing like this one is the direct result of that count: tight knotting is what allows a vine to bend instead of stair-stepping. The weave is executed with the Tabriz hook on a cotton warp and weft, which is what holds a 13' x 19'8" rug straight and square through decades of use, and the wool is dense, springy and clipped at a medium pile that still shows crisp outlines in the detail photographs. Both ends and all selvedges are intact, the pile is full across the whole surface, and there is no sign of the low areas or open foundation that oversize rugs of lesser origin develop early. This is a floor covering meant for a formal living room, a ballroom-scale great room or a long dining room, and it is built to stay there for a lifetime.