4'7" x 8' Persian Hamedan Rug | Brick Red Geometric Village Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a single piece of west Persian village weaving at a size that actually fits real rooms: 4'7" x 8', wide enough to hold a seating group or a bed foot, short enough to live in a study or a smaller dining space. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted on a village loom, and the handle is exactly what you want from Hamedan work, firm, dense and heavy for its size, with a short clipped pile that still carries a soft sheen in the light. Image 6 shows the reverse against a ruler, where you can count the knot rows and see the honest single-weft village structure behind the design. Condition is excellent, with even pile from edge to edge, intact selvedges and clean original fringe at both ends. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted rug made in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is pure village geometry, laid out in three clear layers. A large elongated hexagonal panel fills the centre of the rug, outlined in camel and edged with a fine dotted ivory line, and inside it sits a camel diamond medallion with a stepped, saw-tooth edge and a hooked pendant reaching up and down toward the ends. The medallion is quartered by thin lines and each compartment holds a small 4 flower lozenge in rust, brown and ivory, with a single ivory and salmon diamond at the exact centre. Around the medallion the brick red field runs with a diagonal lattice of small cruciform blossoms, slender leaf forms and tiny hooked bars, all stepped rather than curved, a pattern that reads as orderly from a distance and busy with detail up close. The two end spandrels are filled with vertical wavy vine bands and comb-like bars, a classic tribal filler of the region. The main ivory border alternates a bold red rosette palmette with a narrow double hooked motif, framed by red guard stripes carrying small flowerheads, and the whole scheme belongs squarely with the best village geometric Persian rugs.

Color Palette

The dominant tone is a warm brick red, closer to a ripe tomato than to burgundy, and it shifts slightly from row to row the way hand-dyed wool always does, giving the field depth instead of a flat printed look. Against it the end spandrels go very dark, a deep inky blue that reads almost charcoal in the overhead photo and resolves into true navy in the corner detail. The main border is a soft unbleached ivory with a faint cream cast, which lifts the red and gives the rug its outline on a dark floor. The medallion is the quiet surprise: a pale camel to taupe ground, almost greige, outlined in salmon pink, and it is the one cool, calm area in an otherwise hot palette. Scattered through the field and the borders are small hits of rust orange, chocolate brown, pale grey blue, soft pink and clean ivory, each used in single small shapes so the overall effect stays balanced rather than noisy. There is no white ground and no pastel washing here, so the rug sits comfortably with warm wood, brass, leather and stone.

Hamedan Origin and Weave

Hamedan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Persia, sits in the mountains of the west and acts as the market town for hundreds of surrounding weaving villages. More hand-knotted rugs have come out of this district than any other in the country, which is why Persian Hamedan rugs are the pieces collectors reach for when they want honest tribal drawing and serious durability rather than fine city curvature. The weavers here work from memory and from village patterns rather than from a cartoon, which is why the lattice shifts a fraction across the field and the medallion is not mathematically perfect, the marks of a hand-knotted rug and not a flaw. Hamedan wool comes off mountain sheep and is famously tough and high in lanolin, and the single-weft knotting with a thick cotton warp gives these rugs the stiff, board-like body that survives decades of traffic. This 4'7" x 8' example shows all of it: a tight clipped pile, strong clear dyes, square corners and the kind of structure that takes a hallway, a kitchen edge or a busy living room without complaint.