6'5" x 9'10" Persian Heriz Rug | Red Field, Navy Stepped Medallion | Excellent Condition Wool Pile

This 6'5" x 9'10" Heriz is the classic northwest Persian village format done properly: a wide madder red field, a navy stepped medallion with light blue lobes, and 4 heavy corner spandrels that square the whole composition off. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, still full and even across the field, with clean selvedges and straight sides in the flat overhead photograph. Condition is excellent, with no repairs, no thin areas and no reweaving to disclose. It falls just under the popular 7 x 10 Persian rug bracket, which makes it an easy fit where a 9x12 is too much floor. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, the wool pile and the Persian origin.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is entirely angular, the way it should be in a Heriz: no curved vine, every line stepped and cut on the diagonal. At center sits an 8 lobed medallion outlined in navy, filled with a rosette core and flanked by small light blue panels holding single blossoms. Long hooked pendants run off the top and bottom of the medallion into the open red ground, where large serrated palmettes and angular leaf forms float on either side. The corner spandrels repeat the medallion drawing in light blue and navy and carry their own small rosettes. The main border is a deep navy ground with alternating ivory and gold cartouches, turtle palmettes and open rosettes, tied together by a spiny vine, then bracketed by narrow reciprocal guard stripes. If you like the honest, architectural side of geometric Persian rugs, this is the drawing that defines the type.

A Red and Navy Palette Read Up Close

From across a room this reads as two colors, a deep brick red field against a near black navy border. Step onto it and the palette opens up. The red is not flat: it moves between brick, tomato and a cooler rose where the wool takes the dye differently, the mark of hand-spun yarn dyed in small lots. The navy runs from indigo to a soft midnight in the border and medallion outline. Between them sit the accents that give the rug its life, a clear mid blue in the spandrels and palmette cores, turquoise flecks, warm gold and butter yellow in the border cartouches, olive and sage green in the leaf forms, and creamy ivory used sparingly as an outline so the pattern stays legible. Buyers shopping red and burgundy Persian rugs should know that this one leans warm and saturated rather than pink or washed.

Heriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan. The wool there is famously tough and the local water is mineral rich, which is the practical reason Heriz rugs wear the way they do and why the dyes settle into that particular deep red. Weavers work from memory and from village drawings rather than a full cartoon, which is why the two halves of a Heriz are never mathematically identical and why the medallion in this piece shifts slightly in its outline from one side to the other. Knot counts in village work are moderate by design; the point is a heavy, hard wearing rug rather than a fine one, and the thick 3/8" pile here is built to take decades of traffic. The back photograph, with the ruler laid across the weave, shows the even row structure and the hand-tied knots that confirm the construction.