3'9" x 16'9" Persian Runner Rug | Herati Fish Design | Extra Long Hallway Runner | Perfect Condition

Runners this long are not common, and runners this long and this wide are rarer still. At 3'9" x 16'9" this hand-knotted Persian piece is wide enough to read as a proper floor covering rather than a strip of trim, and long enough to carry a full long hallway runner from one end to the other without a seam or a second rug. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the 2000's, and the rug has never been used: the pile still stands full, the ends are tight and the sides are straight down all 201 inches. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted Persian origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field carries the Herati, known also as mahi or the fish pattern, the most enduring repeating design in Persian weaving. A red diamond lattice runs the full length of the rug, each diamond centered on a small rosette and flanked by 4 curled lanceolate leaves, the so-called fish, with 8 petal rosettes and tiny palmettes filling the spaces between. Because the drawing repeats rather than resolving into a single medallion, the pattern reads correctly from either end, which matters on a 16'9" runner that will be walked in both directions. The main border is ivory, drawn with alternating rose palmettes and serrated dark leaves, separated from the field by a narrow camel-brown vine stripe and finished outside with a red guard band of small blossoms. The corners are resolved by hand rather than mechanically mirrored, and the small irregularities in the lattice are exactly what tells you a person, not a machine, set every knot.

Color

The ground is a deep navy that reads nearly black in shade and opens into a cool blue under direct light, and that darkness is what gives the rug its depth. Over it the lattice is drawn in a warm tomato red, with the rosettes and fish leaves picked out in rose pink, soft salmon, ivory and small flashes of bottle green and dark indigo. Camel-brown appears in the inner guard stripe and in scattered leaves, warming the palette and keeping the red from turning strident. The ivory main border lifts the whole piece and gives the eye a place to rest along both long sides, while the outer red band ties the border back to the field. Practically speaking, a navy and red ground on a runner is the most forgiving combination there is: it hides traffic marks in a hallway better than any light field, and it sits comfortably with oak, walnut and stone floors alike.

Origin and Weave

The Herati is the shared language of the Persian village loom, woven across the country for generations and handed down as a pattern held in memory rather than read from a cartoon. This runner shows that tradition clearly: a firm, tightly beaten wool pile on a cotton foundation, a sturdy medium-fine knot count suited to daily traffic, and the honest small shifts in lattice spacing that come from working a 16'9" warp by hand. Long looms like this are dressed for one rug and one rug only, and weaving a piece this length takes months of steady work, which is why wide extra-long Persian runner rugs reach the market far less often than room-size pieces. The wool is springy and lanolin-rich, the kind that compacts underfoot and recovers, and a rug built this way is meant to be walked on for decades rather than protected.