6'8" x 10' Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Field with Navy Floral Medallion | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

This is a semi-antique room-size Sarouk that has kept its shape, its color and its pile. The proportions are classic: a single navy medallion floating dead center on a red ground, ivory spandrels pulling light into all 4 corners, and a wide indigo border that closes the whole composition. Handled in person, the wool has the slightly waxy, cool feel that older central Persian pile develops once the lanolin has settled, and the back reads clean and tight with no repairs and no reweaving. At 6'8" x 10" the footprint sits squarely in the most usable class of 7 x 10 Persian rugs, big enough to carry a seating group but still easy to place. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the formal Sarouk medallion formula rather than the detached-bouquet style, and it is the better of the two for a room this size. A large lobed medallion sits at the center, built up in concentric rings of curling palmettes and small rosettes around an 8 petal ivory flower head, and it tapers at both ends into a slender pendant finial tipped with a dark cypress-like leaf. The red field around it is not left open: it is filled with a continuous curved vine carrying serrated leaves, hooked palmettes and small blossoms, all drawn on the diagonal so the eye travels rather than stops. The ivory spandrels in the 4 corners repeat the same vocabulary at a smaller scale with a navy cartouche set into each one. Framing it all is a 3 band border system, a wide indigo main band of alternating rosette sprays and upright boteh-like flowering shrubs, flanked by narrow ivory and red guard stripes with a running vine.

The Red, Indigo and Ivory Palette

The field is a true madder red with a cool raspberry lean, and in the close-up frames you can see faint horizontal variation across it where different dye lots met on the loom, the gentle abrash that separates hand-dyed wool from a machine product. Against it the medallion is a deep indigo blue, dark enough at the edges to read almost black in low light and softening to a dusty violet-blue where the pile catches the light. The ivory used in the spandrels and guard stripes is a warm, slightly creamed white rather than a bleached one, which is what keeps the contrast from turning harsh. Scattered through the floral work are the secondary tones that do the real work: blush pink petals, camel and gold leaf tips, soft sage green stems and small touches of chocolate brown outlining. The result is a rug that reads red and navy from across the room and reveals a much wider palette once you are standing on it.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of central Persia, and its weavers built a reputation on two things: heavy, durable construction and formal court-derived drawing borrowed from the older city workshops. Persian Sarouk rugs are knotted on a cotton foundation with a thick, tightly packed wool pile, which is why pieces from this district survive decades of real household traffic while finer, thinner rugs give out. You can see that construction in the back photograph here: straight, evenly spaced rows, no slack, clean selvages and an original ivory fringe. The wool itself is the other half of the story, a long-staple highland fleece that takes madder and indigo deeply and polishes rather than dulls as it is walked on. This example has been used gently and kept well, with full even pile from end to end and no thin areas.