6'7" x 9'1" Persian Heriz Rug | All-Over Geometric Ivory Field | Navy Border, Excellent Condition

Most Heriz rugs put a single enormous medallion in the middle of the field and let everything else answer to it. This one does not. Across a soft ivory ground the weaver ran an all-over lattice of angular palmettes, serrated leaves and small boxed rosettes, anchored by a tiny dark rosette at the exact center, so the eye keeps moving rather than settling in one place. It is hand-knotted in 100% wool on a cotton foundation, the pile is even and full with no thin areas, and the drawing stays symmetrical corner to corner. At 6'7" x 9'1" it sits in the most useful band of 6x9 Persian rugs, large enough to hold a seating group and still light enough for one person to reposition. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is built from four large hooked palmettes that radiate out from the center rosette, each drawn in blue and outlined in rust, with long serrated leaves shooting diagonally toward the 4 corners. Around them the weaver filled the ivory ground with small squares, stepped crosses, 4 petal and 8 petal rosettes, cypress-like sprays and tiny stylized animal and bird forms that only reveal themselves close up, visible in the detail photographs. The corners are resolved with heavy stepped brackets rather than curved spandrels, which is the honest village solution and the reason this drawing reads as one of the strongest geometric Persian rugs in this size class. The main border carries alternating rosettes and angular vine on a dark ground, framed inside and out by narrow guard stripes of small floral heads and a running reciprocal band along the very edge.

The Ivory, Navy and Rust Palette

The field reads as a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to bright white, and it is what makes this piece easy to live with in a light room where a red-ground rug would dominate. Against it the drawing works in two dominant tones: a deep indigo navy that carries the main border and the large hooked palmettes, and a rust that ranges from brick to a softer terracotta in the leaves, vine work and rosette outlines. Secondary colors are quiet but plentiful, including camel and old gold in the corner brackets, a pale sage in the small leaf forms, a clear mid blue in the scattered rosettes, and touches of dark brown that outline the larger shapes and give the whole field its definition. If your palette runs toward ivory and beige rugs, this is the warmer, more colorful end of that range.

Heriz Weaving and Quality

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, and the rugs made there owe their reputation to two things: the local wool, which is unusually tough and takes dye with real depth, and the mineral-rich water used in washing, which is credited with the particular clarity of the reds and blues. Heriz weavers work from memory and from a village tradition rather than from a detailed cartoon, which is why the line is angular, the medallion forms are stepped instead of curved, and no two pieces repeat exactly. Village knot counts here normally sit below 200 knots per square inch, and that is by design: a heavier knot on a stout cotton foundation with a good wool pile is what makes a Heriz the rug people put in a busy room and still hand down. The close-up of the pile in the photographs shows the wool clearly, dense and springy, with the full body of a rug that has been well kept.