6'10" x 10' Antique Persian Heriz Rug | Red Field with Navy Medallion | One of a Kind

This is an old Heriz, knotted by hand in a village workshop in northwest Persia, wool pile on a cotton foundation, and it wears its years honestly. At 6'10" x 10' it covers a seating group or sits under a 6 chair table with room to pull the chairs back, and it is the sort of piece people who shop 7 x 10 Persian rugs hunt for and rarely find twice. The rust red field has mellowed toward rose where the light and the traffic hit it, the pile is a touch lower along the old walking lines, and the wool has that dry glassy shine that only decades of use produce. Nothing here is reproduced, printed or machine made, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a stepped ivory medallion set into a deep indigo cartouche, with 8 blue serrated leaf forms radiating around a small rose rosette that closes on a dark square. Above and below it, long navy anchor pendants run out toward the ends, each one filled with ivory and blue leaf blades. The 4 corners carry indigo spandrels packed with hooked vines, palmettes and little stepped squares, and the red field between them is filled with angular rosettes, serrated leaves and small blossom heads drawn freehand rather than copied square by square, which is why the left and right halves never quite match. The main border is navy, running a chain of palmettes, diamond rosettes and forked vine arms, flanked by red and ivory reciprocal zigzag guard stripes. It is a textbook example of why collectors chase geometric Persian rugs: every curve has been resolved into a straight line or a step.

A Field of Faded Brick and Deep Indigo

The field reads as a warm brick red that shifts band by band into terracotta and soft salmon, the natural abrash of hand dyed yarn dipped in separate lots. Against it the border and the medallion ground sit in a dark indigo that goes almost black in low light and opens into true navy in daylight. The drawing is picked out in undyed ivory, which has aged to a warm cream, with clear sky blue leaf blades, muted sage green in the spandrel vines, camel gold in the scattered rosettes and a dusty rose pink that appears in the palmettes and the border flowers. The palette is low in contrast and high in depth, the kind of coloring that settles into a room with oak floors, leather and old walnut instead of fighting it.

Heriz Weaving East of Tabriz

Heriz is a cluster of villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, where the mineral rich water is credited with the famously tough local wool. Weavers there work from memory on village looms, which is why the drawing is angular, the medallions stepped and the corners squared off rather than curved. Knot counts in this tradition usually sit under 200 knots per square inch, and the trade off is exactly what a buyer wants in a floor rug: a heavy, thick pile on a stout cotton foundation that shrugs off generations of use, as the back in the final photograph shows. Wear like this reads as age rather than damage, and if you want to understand the signs yourself, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the weave, the dyes and the selvedges one by one.