6'11" x 9'6" Persian Heriz Rug | Red Field, Stepped Geometric Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a classic village Heriz in the size most American rooms actually want, 6'11" x 9'6", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a full 3/8" pile that still stands up square across the whole field. The drawing is pure Heriz: a large stepped medallion anchored dead center, four ivory corner spandrels, and a deep navy main border carrying rosettes and stiff little flowering shrubs. The wool has the dry, slightly glossy handle that Heriz weavers get from the tough highland fleece of the region, and the pile shows no low spots or repairs in any of the photographs. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, knotting and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 point stepped medallion built entirely from straight lines and notched steps, with a small hooked lozenge at its heart and 4 ivory cartouche-shaped satellites set at the diagonals. Above and below it, tall serrated pendants reach toward the ends of the field, each one filled with angular leaves and stiff cypress forms. The corner spandrels are drawn in ivory with curling cloud-band tendrils, and inside each spandrel sits a small framed panel with a shrub and animal-like figure, the kind of free improvisation village looms allow. The main border alternates flowering plants with paired rosette panels, flanked by narrow guard stripes of running vine. If you like this kind of straight-line drawing, it sits in the same family as our other geometric Persian rugs, and the proportions here are textbook for 7 x 10 Persian rugs.

Color: Madder Red, Midnight Navy and Ivory

The open field reads as a warm madder red, brick leaning slightly toward tomato in raking light and settling into a deeper claret where the shadow falls, as you can see comparing the flat studio shot with the outdoor floor photograph. The main border is a near-black midnight navy, which is what makes the red field look so lit up from the inside. Against those two, the weaver placed soft ivory in the spandrels and in the 4 satellite cartouches, a chalky sky blue through the medallion arms and the pendant leaves, and small hits of saffron gold, olive green and rose pink that appear only where the drawing changes direction. Fine black outlining separates every color so the pattern stays crisp rather than muddy. This is a red and multi-color rug in the traditional sense: dominant red, but with enough blue, cream and gold in the mix to pull from most palettes in the room.

Heriz: Village Weaving East of Tabriz

Heriz is a group of weaving villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, and its reputation rests on two things: mineral-rich water that sets dyes beautifully, and highland wool that is famously tough underfoot. Heriz weavers work from memory and from small scale drawings rather than a fully painted cartoon, which is why the medallion here is squared off and stepped instead of curved, and why the two ends of the field are close but never identical. Village weaving of this type generally sits under 200 knots per square inch, and that coarser, heavier structure is the point: a thick wool pile on a sturdy cotton foundation is what lets a Heriz take decades of traffic and still show full pile, exactly as this one does. Woven in Persia, this is the piece to buy if you want a rug that looks handmade rather than printed and is built to be walked on.