6'8" x 9'10" Persian Mashad Rug | Red Floral Medallion | Woven Signature in Border

Laid out on the showroom floor, this Persian Mashad rug reads as one of the more generous room sizes in the Khorasan tradition: a deep red field crowded with flowering vinework, a layered rosette medallion holding the center, and four ivory corner spandrels that square the composition off cleanly. The pile is 100% wool on a cotton foundation, with the dense, slightly lustrous handle that good Khorasan fleece gives a rug after it has been properly washed and finished. A small woven signature sits in the lower border, the mark of a named workshop rather than an anonymous village loom, though the script is too fine to read from the photographs. At 6'8" x 9'10" it sits squarely in the 7x10 Persian rugs range, large enough to anchor a seating group with the front legs of the sofa on the wool. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center carries a layered floral medallion built around a multi-petal rosette, ringed by scrolling leaf cusps and finished with a small pendant at each end along the long axis. Around it the field is worked as a true all-over floral design rather than open ground: rosettes, star flowers, feathery serrated leaves and curling vine tendrils fill almost every inch, with curved split palmettes spreading out of the navy corner brackets. The 4 corners are drawn in ivory and soft salmon, which lifts them away from the red and frames the medallion the way a classic workshop cartoon intends. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a narrow ivory meander on the outside, a light blue guard carrying small blossoms, then the wide navy main border with alternating red cartouche panels and 8 petal rosettes, and matching guards inside. The drawing throughout is curvilinear and fluid, which is the point of a city workshop rug, and the repeats are read rather than copied, so small variations in flower color appear from one panel to the next.

Reading the Color: Crimson, Navy and Ivory

The ground is a warm crimson, closer to a true cherry red than to brick or rust, and it holds its saturation from end to end with only the gentle tonal movement you expect from hand-dyed wool. Against it the palette works in cool contrast: the main border and the corner brackets are deep indigo navy, the guard stripes a clear mid light blue, and the floral heads are picked out in ivory, cream, soft salmon, rose pink, pale gold and small touches of teal and olive. That mix of a hot field with cool blue framing is what makes a rug like this sit comfortably in a room that already has blue upholstery or a painted wall, and it is why the design remains one of the most reliable choices among red Persian rugs. The ivory selvage and fringe at both ends are bright and intact, keeping the outline crisp on a dark or a pale floor.

Mashad and the Weaving of Khorasan

Mashad sits in Khorasan, in the northeast corner of Persia, and it has woven for the pilgrimage trade and for the domestic city market for generations. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why Mashad pieces tend to keep a rich red rather than fading toward orange, and the local looms are large enough that room sizes and oversize pieces are a normal part of the output rather than a special order. Weavers here work from a designer's cartoon, which is how the curved medallion, the matched spandrels and the running cartouche border stay in register across nearly 10 feet of length. The back of this rug, shown with the ruler, reads evenly knotted with a tight, regular grid and no slack rows, and the pile stands full with no wear through to the foundation. A signed piece in this condition is a workshop rug, not a commercial run, and it is built to be walked on for decades.