6'8" x 10'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Ivory Stepped Medallion on Navy Field | Excellent Condition

This 6'8" x 10'7" Persian Bakhtiar rug sets a stepped ivory medallion against a navy blue field carried edge to edge in small flower heads, the kind of confident village drawing that made Bakhtiar weaving a favorite of American dealers for a century. The pile is heavy, lanolin-rich wool from the flocks of the Zagros foothills, knotted on a cotton foundation and clipped at a medium height that still stands full and upright. Sides are straight, the pile is even from end to end, and the hand-tied ivory fringe is original at both ends. At 6 feet 8 inches by 10 feet 7 inches it sits in the same working footprint as our 7x10 Persian rugs, large enough to hold a sofa and two chairs with the front legs on the wool. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a large ivory medallion drawn with sawtooth steps rather than a smooth curve, filled with a dense scroll of blossoms, buds and small leaf sprays. Inside it sit 3 dark lozenges: one large brown-black cartouche carrying an 8 petal rosette with pink and blue flower heads around it, flanked by 2 small matching diamonds. Lantern-shaped pendants reach out from the top and bottom of the medallion into the field, each one a little palmette cluster outlined in salmon and blue. Around the medallion the field runs as a strict all over floral field of repeating rosettes on a diagonal lattice, with curling vines and larger palmettes reserved for the 4 corner spandrels. The main border alternates broad palmettes and rounded blossoms on a salmon ground, framed by ivory guard stripes of linked rosettes and vine, and closed on the outside by a narrow dark stripe of small triangles. It is a workshop-grade medallion layout executed with a village hand, so the repeats breathe slightly rather than locking into machine symmetry.

Ivory, Navy Blue, Green and Shrimp

The palette is built on 3 clear notes. The medallion ground is a warm ivory that reads cream to light wheat depending on the light, and it is the brightest thing in the rug. The field behind it is a deep indigo navy that lifts to a smoky denim blue in places where the dye lot changed on the loom, and that blue is what makes the ivory center snap forward. The third note is shrimp, a soft brick-salmon that fills the main border and reappears all through the field as the petals of the small rosettes, so the border and the field talk to each other instead of competing. Supporting colors are read in the close-up photos: muted sage and teal green in the border leaves and palmette cores, warm brown and near-black in the medallion lozenges and outer stripe, and pale peach highlights in the guard stripes. Nothing here is loud. The whole range sits in the aged, slightly dusty register that works with walnut and mahogany furniture, cream upholstery and oak or dark hardwood floors.

Bakhtiar Weaving in the Zagros Villages

Bakhtiar rugs come from the Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari highlands of western Persia, southwest of Isfahan, where villages such as Saman, Shalamzar, Boldaji and Faradonbeh weave for the Bakhtiari tribal confederation. The region is best known for the khesti or garden panel layout, but the better village looms also work classic medallion and all over designs like this one, borrowing the formal drawing of the city workshops and keeping the sturdier village structure underneath. Two things define the quality: the wool and the beat-down. Mountain pasture at altitude produces a long, greasy, high-lanolin fleece that takes dye deeply and resists crushing, and the weavers pack the wefts hard against a cotton foundation so the rug lies flat and takes traffic for generations. Knot count is not the point in a Bakhtiar; density, wool quality and the clarity of the drawing are, and on all 3 counts this piece is a strong example of what the Bakhtiari looms do best.