4'4" x 7' Persian Sarouk Rug | Antique 1930s Rose Red All-Over Floral | Grandma Rug

This is the rug most Americans picture when they think of an heirloom: a 1930s Sarouk on a rose red ground, covered edge to edge in flowering sprays, with a deep navy border holding the whole thing together. It measures 4'4" x 7', a true scatter size that works where a larger piece would not, and the wool still carries the soft sheen that good old Persian Sarouk rugs are bought for. Hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a dense wool pile, it survives in excellent condition with even nap across the field and intact ends and sides, as the close-ups and the back photo show. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming age, origin and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the field carries the classic Sarouk arrangement of detached floral sprays, one of the most collected of all all-over floral rugs: paired navy palmettes, serrated acanthus leaves, tulip and carnation heads, and slender flowering stems that bend around a pale teal rosette at the center. The drawing is symmetrical top to bottom but never mechanical, with small variations in petal count and leaf direction that tell you a weaver was reading a design rather than copying a grid. The navy main border runs a continuous reciprocal vine of ocher and salmon blossoms, flanked by light blue guard stripes with tiny red and purple florets, and the 4 corners resolve cleanly without crowding the pattern. Open rose ground between the sprays gives the design air, which is why a piece of this size never feels busy.

The Rose Red and Navy Palette

The field is a warm rose red that shifts between raspberry and dusty pink depending on where the light falls, the kind of tone that only comes out of old madder-based dyeing and decades of gentle mellowing. Against it the borders read almost black-blue, with indigo used again inside the field for the palmettes and the fine stem work. Between those two poles sit the colors that make the rug: sage and olive green leaves, mustard and gold ocher petals, ivory and cream blossoms, soft salmon and a clear pale teal that appears in the central rosette and the guard stripes. Small notes of tomato red punctuate the flower hearts. If you are shopping the warmer end of the spectrum, this sits squarely among red and burgundy Persian rugs, though the pink cast makes it far easier to live with than a hard crimson.

Sarouk Weaving and 1930s Quality

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of west central Persia, and in the 1920s and 1930s its weavers produced the rugs that furnished American homes by the thousand, which is exactly why these pieces are still called grandma rugs. The weave is firm and heavy for its scale, with a thick wool pile packed down onto a cotton foundation, and the back photo shows the tight, regular knotting and the honest hand of a village loom working to workshop standards. Wool from the region is long-stapled and greasy, so it takes dye deeply and burnishes rather than wears thin, which is how a rug approaching a century old still shows full pile. If you want to understand what puts this piece in the 1930s rather than later, our guide on how to date an oriental rug walks through the same markers we used, and buyers looking at similar proportions can also browse 5x7 Persian and Oriental rugs.