5'5" x 8'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | Garden Panel Design, Woven Calligraphy Border | Wool & Silk

This 5'5" x 8'5" Persian Tabriz is a panel garden rug, which means the field is divided into dozens of small compartments rather than built around a single medallion, and every compartment carries a different drawing. It is hand-knotted in fine wool with silk highlights over a cotton foundation, clipped to a low 1/4" pile so the outlines stay crisp, and the condition is excellent with the full pile and both end fringes intact. The feature that sets it apart is the border: ivory cartouches filled with woven Persian script run the whole way around the rug, a detail only a workshop with a proper cartoon and a patient weaver will attempt. Every rug we ship is a piece we imported ourselves and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a staggered grid of interlocking panels, stepped and cusped rather than plain squares, and no two neighbors repeat. Footed vases and flowering urns sit in some panels, coral red tree branches with small perched birds fill others, and between them are diamond compartments packed with fine lattice and trellis work in ivory, crimson and pale blue. Eight point stars framed in navy hold gold grounds with 8 petal rosettes at their centers, and tiny animal and bird figures hide in the denser floral panels, so the rug keeps revealing detail the longer you look at it. The main border reverses the logic of the field: an olive green ground carries elongated ivory cartouches of flowing calligraphy, alternating with apricot quatrefoil medallions filled with a crimson meander fret. Four narrow guard stripes of rosettes and running vine separate that band from a plain camel outer edge, and the corners resolve cleanly, which is the first place you check a drawing this complicated.

A Multi-Color Palette Built on Ivory, Camel Gold and Olive

The ground reads ivory to warm cream, warming toward a soft blush in the open areas where the tree branches sit, and the panel frames shift through camel and old gold so the grid looks woven rather than drawn on. Against that, the olive green border is the anchor, deep enough to hold the ivory script and the marigold to apricot medallions without either going flat. Accents are placed sparingly and repeat with discipline: navy blue for outlines, stars and small florets, crimson and brick red in the fretwork and lattice fills, dusty rose and blush pink in the trellis panels, a few touches of pale sky blue and saffron yellow in the rosettes. The silk highlights sit on the leaves, branches and rosette centers, and they shift from pale to luminous as you walk around the rug. It is a genuinely multi-colored Persian rug that still reads as warm and golden from across a room.

Tabriz: The Town and the Weave

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for centuries, the town where the cartoon, the loom setup and the finishing were turned into a trade. Weavers there count fineness in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, and the workshops are judged on drawing above everything else: a curved line that stays curved, a border that turns a corner without a stumble, script that is legible as script. You can see those standards in this piece, in the tightly clipped pile that keeps the small lattice panels readable, in the many narrow guard stripes each resolved properly, and in the even, close knotting visible on the reverse. Among Persian Tabriz rugs, calligraphy borders are the uncommon ones, and a wool and silk panel garden at this size is a piece that rewards a floor where people actually stand over it.