5'10" x 10' Persian Mashad Rug | Raspberry Red Floral Medallion | Semi-Antique Khorasan Weave

This is a long, narrow piece in the classic workshop format, 5'10" x 10' of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, and the extra length is what makes it useful: it fills a sofa wall or a long room without crowding the furniture. The drawing is pure Mashad, a navy lobed medallion floating in a raspberry red field of scrolling vine, framed by a deep navy main border and ivory guard stripes. The pile has the slight silkiness that older Persian Mashad rugs develop with age, the selvedges and the white cotton fringe are intact, and the condition is excellent throughout with no repairs, no open areas and even pile from end to end. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is handmade and Persian.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a navy lobed medallion built around an 8 petal rosette, ringed by pink and ivory palmettes and finished top and bottom with a pendant finial. Out of that medallion the field runs as a continuous system of curved vine, split palmettes, serrated lanceolate leaves and small rosettes, mirrored across both axes so the pattern reads the same from either end of the room. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion colouring in navy, which pulls the composition tight and sets off the open red ground between them. The main border carries large navy cartouche-like palmettes separated by upright flowering sprays, with a boteh and vine ivory guard stripe on each side and a fine reciprocal minor stripe outside that. Look closely at the detail photographs and you can see the drawing is curvilinear throughout, with no straight tribal lines anywhere, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon and a town loom rather than a village weave.

A Raspberry Red Field with Navy, Ivory and Sage

The ground is a cool raspberry red, closer to cerise than to brick, and it is the colour that makes this rug: it lifts the room rather than darkening it the way heavier red and burgundy Persian rugs can. Against it sit three anchoring darks, the near-black navy of the medallion, spandrels and main border, a softer mid blue in the smaller flowerheads, and the brown-olive of the leaf work. The lighter palette is where the rug gets its multi-colour character: chalky ivory in the guard stripes and petal outlines, dusty rose and salmon pink through the palmettes, sage and moss green in the leaves, pale sky blue in the vine tips, and a scattering of soft gold. Because the wool is older the dyes have settled into a mellow, slightly variegated tone rather than a flat block of colour, and the fringe and outer red stripe read a touch warmer than the field. Photographs 1 and 5 show the pink and rose tones most accurately; the floor shots skew slightly darker under room lighting.

Mashad Weaving in Khorasan, Northeast Persia

Mashad sits in Khorasan in the far northeast of Persia, a pilgrimage city with a long commercial weaving trade and a reputation for large, finely drawn medallion rugs in exactly this palette of red and navy. The wool from the surrounding province is long-stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why Mashad reds hold their depth for decades and why the pile keeps a quiet sheen underfoot. This piece is workshop work rather than village work: the symmetry is exact, the medallion is centred, the border corners resolve cleanly, and the knot count is fine enough to carry the curved vine without breaking it into steps. The back shown in the final photograph is tightly and evenly knotted on cotton warps, which is what gives a Mashad of this age its flat lie and its ability to go on taking daily traffic for another generation. If you want to understand how a piece like this is placed in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here.