4'8" x 7'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Kashan Tree of Life with Birds and Deer | Wool with Silk, 1970s

This 4'8" x 7'7" Persian Tabriz was knotted in the 1970s on a cotton foundation, in fine wool carrying a touch of silk through the highlights, and roughly 50 years later it still shows a full, even pile with no thin areas and no repairs. The ivory field reads as a living garden rather than a formal medallion layout: a tree of life climbs the center axis while songbirds perch on the vines and spotted fawns and grey gazelles move between the blossoms. The drawing comes out of the classical Kashan design repertoire, redrawn by a Tabriz workshop with the tighter, more controlled line that town is known for. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is built as a mirrored all over floral composition around a single vertical axis. Serrated leaves and thin brown vines fan out from a base cluster at the bottom edge and rise through tiers of palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, tulips, carnations and small blue blossoms. Pairs of facing birds sit at three levels of the field, beak to beak over a central flower head, and slender deer stride through the scroll work at the top and bottom corners, one pair spotted in cinnamon brown, another pair in soft grey. The detail photographs show how small the drawing gets: individual birds no wider than a thumb, with eyes, beaks and wing feathers all resolved in knots. Framing all of it is a green border of alternating shield-shaped cartouches and rust palmettes, joined by pale blue split leaf scrolls, with a narrow ivory guard inside and a plain deep burgundy outer band that finishes the 4 corners cleanly. Ivory cotton fringe is hand-tied at both ends.

Ivory Field, Green Border, Burgundy Edge

Ivory is the main color and it is a warm, wool-toned ivory rather than a bleached white, shifting toward soft cream where the light catches the silk in the pile and toward a faint pistachio cast in the shaded photographs. Against that ground the palette is unusually broad for a rug this size: cherry red and burgundy in the flower centers, deep bottle green and teal in the leaves and the main border ground, sky and light blue in the small blossoms and the scroll work, navy blue in the outlines that hold the drawing crisp, gold and ochre in the smaller buds, and brown running through the vines that connects everything. Peach and pink palmettes give the field its highlights, and the solid burgundy outer band contains the whole composition. The mix means the rug sits comfortably with both cool furnishings, as in the teal sofa setting shown, and with warm leather and oak.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for centuries, with workshops that measure their own fineness in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in. A Tabriz weaver works from a cartoon with a hook-ended knife, and that discipline is what lets a workshop take on a design like this one, where curved vines, animal figures and facing birds all have to stay symmetrical across a 56 in width. The wool here is tightly spun and dense, clipped low enough that the outlines stay sharp, with silk worked into selected highlights so certain flowers catch light differently as you walk around the rug. Fifty years on the pile is still full, the foundation is sound, and the colors have settled into the softer, deeper register that only time gives a naturally dyed Persian weave.