6'7" x 9'11" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field, Sage Green Medallion | Wool & Silk, 400 KPSI

This 6'7" x 9'11" Persian Tabriz was woven on a cotton foundation with a wool and silk pile at roughly 400 knots per square inch, which the workshops of the city count as 60 Raj. The silk is used with restraint rather than as decoration: it runs through the vine stems, the petal edges and parts of the medallion, so the surface changes tone as you move past it while the wool keeps the pile dense and resilient underfoot. The rug is recent and has never been on a floor, with full pile, straight edges, even selvedges and clean hand-tied fringe at both ends, as the back photograph shows. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and at this footprint it falls into the most requested proportion we stock, 7 x 10 Persian rugs.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 petal star medallion on a sage ground, with a brown inner rosette and a small ivory 8 point star at the very core, finished top and bottom with slender lobed pendants. Around it the ivory field carries a continuous vine scroll rather than a repeated block: curved stems, lanceolate leaves, palmettes, lotus heads and small rosettes that mirror across the long axis and the short axis without ever sitting quite flat, which is the signature of a drawn cartoon rather than a copied grid. Deep olive and brown spandrels fill all 4 corners with their own arabesque and leaf work, and a soft ivory outline separates them from the field so the medallion reads clearly from across the room. The main border is a sage ground with alternating palmettes and framed rosettes joined by a flowing vine, flanked by pale turquoise guard bands of running scroll and a narrow chain of dots and flower heads at the outermost edge.

The Ivory and Green Palette

The field is a warm ivory, closer to cream than to white, which keeps the rug from feeling cold in a room with natural light. Green does the structural work in 3 registers: a muted sage on the medallion and the main border ground, a darker olive in the corner spandrels and the larger leaf forms, and a clear seafoam that appears in the guard bands and inside the smaller blossoms. Blue enters as turquoise, used in short accents on petal centers, bird-like leaf tips and the small paired flowers along the border, and it is this turquoise that keeps the green from reading as a single flat color. Warm brown and soft gold anchor the medallion core and the spandrels, while tiny touches of coral, brick red and pale rose sit inside the flower heads at a scale you only notice up close. The result is a quiet green and ivory rug at a distance and a genuinely multi colored one at arm's length.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most consistently commercial weaving city for centuries, which is why its output is graded so precisely. Fineness there is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in: 40 Raj is ordinary commercial work, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is where a rug crosses into collector territory because the drawing can finally follow a true curve. That is the grade here, and it shows in the unbroken vine stems and the crisp outlines around every petal. Tabriz weavers work with a hook-ended knife on vertical looms and beat the weft down hard, giving a flat, tight back with clearly legible knot rows, visible in the ruler photograph. The pile is trimmed low and evenly, which is deliberate at this knot count: a short clip is what lets 400 knots per square inch of detail stay readable instead of blurring into the wool.