6'4" x 9'9" Persian Sarouk Rug | Raspberry Red Floral Medallion | Ivory Borders, Excellent Condition

This is a hand-knotted Persian rug in the classic floral medallion manner of Persian Sarouk rugs, woven on a cotton foundation with a dense wool pile and finished at 6'4" x 9'9". The pile is even from end to end, the selvedges are intact and the ivory fringes are full, which is why it grades excellent. Laid out on the floor it reads as one continuous piece of drawing: a single lobed medallion at dead center, an unbroken field of curling vines and small blossoms around it, and four deep navy spandrels that square off the corners. At 76" by 117" it sits comfortably in the practical middle of the 6x9 Persian rugs range, large enough to anchor a seating group without swallowing a room. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is built as an 8 petal rosette inside a navy cartouche, ringed by a pale ivory outline that lifts it clear of the field, with pendant finials dropping above and below along the long axis. Around it the field fills with split palmettes, curled serrated leaves, small eight petal flowerheads and thin arabesque vines that loop back on themselves, drawn small and repeated so the eye keeps finding new detail rather than resting. The 4 corner spandrels carry the same vocabulary on a dark ground, mirroring the medallion so the layout reads symmetrically from any side. The border system runs multiple bands: a wide navy main border of alternating palmette and vase-like floral cartouches, flanked by ivory guard stripes of leaf and rosette meander, and outer minor bands of small crossed X motifs in blue and rust that frame the whole piece cleanly against the plain red outer edge.

Color Palette

The field is a warm raspberry red that shifts toward cherry where the light catches the pile and toward a cooler rose where the nap runs the other way, a natural abrash you can see clearly in the close photographs. Against it the medallion, spandrels and main border hold a deep inky navy that is almost black in shadow, which is what gives the rug its depth on camera and on the floor. The drawing itself is outlined in soft ivory and cream, and the smaller motifs are picked out in rose pink, sky and teal blue, olive green, pale gold and touches of soft brown. There is no black-and-white contrast anywhere in it; the palette is layered and jewel-like, which makes the rug forgiving with red, blue, cream and wood-toned interiors alike. The ivory guard stripes act as a visual break, keeping the red field and the navy border from running together.

Origin and Weaving Quality

The Sarouk name comes from the weaving villages of the Arak region in west central Persia, an area that has produced curvilinear floral medallion rugs for well over a century and that built its American reputation on exactly this combination of a red field, a navy medallion and a heavy, hard-wearing wool pile. What defines the type is not extreme knot count but discipline in the drawing and honesty in the materials: a tight cotton warp and weft, wool spun with enough lanolin left in it to stay lustrous, and a pile clipped medium-low so the pattern stays crisp. You can see that on the reverse of this piece, where the knotting is regular and the pattern reads almost as clearly from the back as from the front, the standard test for a genuinely hand-knotted Persian rug. It is a weave built for decades of real use rather than for a display case.