5'2" x 8' Mahi Tabriz Design Rug | Wool & Silk Herati Fish Pattern | Brand New

This 5'2" x 8' rug is a brand new hand-knotted piece drawn in the Mahi Tabriz idiom, one of the most demanding classical layouts an Oriental rug workshop can attempt. The field reads copper at a distance and breaks into thousands of tiny rosettes and lattice diamonds up close, with silk worked through the wool so the medallion and spandrels shift in brightness as you walk around the room. It has never been on a floor, the pile stands crisp and even edge to edge, the selvedges are tight and the ivory fringe is full and untrimmed. A certificate of authenticity is included with every rug we ship.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the name comes from the herati unit repeated across the field: a small rosette inside a diamond, flanked by 4 curved leaves that early weavers read as fish circling a pond. Here that unit repeats in perfect register from border to border, uninterrupted, which is the hardest part of the drawing to hold over 8 feet of length. A scalloped navy medallion sits dead center with a layered ivory and rose core, and it is answered by 2 small pendant cartouches on the long axis and by 4 deeply lobed corner spandrels. The main border carries a vine of round rosettes and star palmettes with slender leaf sprays between them, framed by narrow guard bands of tulip heads and reciprocal trefoils. Every outline in the design is a curved line rather than a step, which is only possible at a fine knot count.

The Copper, Navy and Celadon Palette

The field is a warm copper, closer to terracotta and old brick than to a true red, and it is quietly shaded by the rose and charcoal drawing packed into it so it never looks flat. Against that sits deep midnight navy in the medallion, the corner brackets and the main border, a contrast strong enough to carry the room from across the floor. The spandrels and the inner quarters of the medallion are a soft celadon green that cools everything down, and ivory does the outlining work: it rings the medallion, edges the cartouches and runs through the guard stripes as a clean line of light. Scattered through the herati units are small notes of salmon, teal and cream, and the silk content picks up those lighter tones first, so the celadon and ivory areas glow against the matte wool copper depending on the angle of the light.

Woven in India in the Tabriz Mahi Tradition

This rug was made in India, which is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work now comes from. The top Indian ateliers took the classical cartoons seriously, trained weavers on them for a generation, and today they produce fine wool and silk pieces at knot counts and drawing standards that used to belong only to a handful of city workshops. You can see it on the back: small, tight, even knots on a cotton foundation, straight sides and square corners with no pull at the ends. The Mahi cartoon is the test case for that kind of workshop, because a loose weave turns the herati field into mush and the curved medallion outline into a staircase. Neither happens here, and at 5'2" x 8' the whole composition reads correctly under a coffee table or in front of a bed.