6'7" x 10'6" Persian Ardakan Rug | Rose Red Floral Medallion | Navy Border, Excellent Condition

This 6'7" x 10'6" Persian Ardakan is the kind of formal floral rug that holds a room together without shouting at it. The field has settled into a soft rose red, the border is a deep inky navy, and the drawing between them is fine enough that you keep finding small blossoms you missed the first time. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, handled flat and even across all 10'6", with the original selvages and fringes intact and no repairs anywhere in the body. It falls neatly into the 7x10 Persian rugs range, the most useful footprint in most American homes. Every rug we ship, this one included, leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The layout follows the classical central medallion formula that Ardakan weavers inherited from the workshops of Persian Kashan rugs: a lobed ivory medallion with a navy outline at the center, a small rosette at its core, and a pair of slender pendants reaching up and down the long axis toward two large anchor palmettes. The 4 corners carry matching spandrels drawn in the same ivory, so the eye reads a complete frame within the frame. Around and behind all of that runs a dense all over lattice of vine scroll, serrated leaves, cypress tips and open blossoms, never repeating in a way that looks mechanical. The main border is a wide navy band of alternating palmettes and curled leaf forms, flanked by narrow guard stripes of ivory and rose carrying a tiny repeating rosette, with a further fine meander at the outer edge. It is a disciplined, curvilinear drawing with no filler.

Color: Rose Red, Navy and Ivory

The field is a warm rose red that leans toward salmon under daylight and deepens to brick under lamplight, the gentle tone that collectors look for among red Persian rugs rather than the hard primary red of newer commercial production. Against it the main border reads deep navy with a faint aubergine cast where the light catches the pile at an angle. The medallion and spandrels are ivory going to soft cream, and inside them sits the most varied palette in the rug: sky blue and powder blue petals, a bright mustard gold center, touches of bottle green, rust, soft pink and a brown that is nearly chocolate in the leaf outlines. Those same sky blue blossoms are scattered throughout the red field, which is what keeps a large expanse of red from going flat, and the ivory guard stripes draw a clean bright line between field and border.

Ardakan: The Town and the Weave

Ardakan sits in central Persia, north of Yazd on the edge of the desert, and its weavers built their reputation by taking the refined floral cartoons of the central Persian workshops and executing them on a sturdy, everyday foundation. The result is a rug that looks formal and wears like a village piece. The back of this one, shown against a ruler, tells the story: tight, regular rows, clean knot definition on cotton warps, and no slack or lumpy areas where the tension wandered. The 3/8" wool pile is dense and springy underfoot, the kind of local wool that takes dye well and polishes with use rather than dulling. At 6'7" x 10'6" it sits under a full dining table with chairs pulled out, or anchors a seating group with all 4 front legs on the rug, and it has clearly been cared for: even pile, straight sides, square corners.