6' x 9' Chinese Silk Rug | Tabriz Medallion Design | Fine Hand-Knotted Silk Pile, Brand New

Laid flat, this piece behaves the way only a silk pile does: the red ground reads deep and almost wine dark from one end and bright tomato from the other, and the ivory medallion lifts off the field as you cross the room. It is hand-knotted, 100% silk pile on a cotton foundation, drawn to the classic Tabriz medallion layout, and it has never been on a floor. The pile is clipped low, which is why the small rosettes and the thin vine scrolls stay legible rather than blurring, and the hand is cool and fluid instead of woolly. At 6' x 9' it lands squarely in the most useful of all 6x9 area rug sizes, large enough to carry a sofa and two chairs, small enough to leave a border of floor showing. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity recording the size, the materials and the origin.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a textbook Tabriz medallion and spandrel composition, worked in a rounded oval rather than the usual diamond. At the center sits a layered rosette medallion: a small blossom core ringed in red, then rank after rank of pointed ivory petals filled with pale green tendrils and tiny star forms, each petal outlined so finely that the whole disc looks engraved. Slender pendants drop from the top and bottom of the medallion into the field, where a continuous vine scroll fills every inch of the red ground with ivory daisies, gold buds, curled acanthus leaves and small hooked sprays. The oval is enclosed by a narrow blue-grey ribbon and then by a wide gold cartouche of flowering branches that fills the 4 corners of the field, each corner carrying its own bird-of-paradise blossoms and trailing stems. Around all of this run the borders: an ivory vine band, a navy main border of pale green palmettes alternating with ivory rosettes, and slim reciprocal guard stripes that keep the whole frame tight and symmetrical.

Color: Tomato Red, Saffron Gold and Deep Navy

The field is a warm tomato red with a brick undertone, and because it is silk it never sits still: viewed with the nap it goes soft and rosy, against the nap it drops toward burgundy. Against that red, the ivory of the medallion and the outer spandrel ground reads almost white, while the inner spandrel panels are a full saffron gold that becomes the second dominant color of the rug. The main border is deep navy, nearly indigo, and it does the work of framing the warm center and anchoring the rug to a dark hardwood or a charcoal floor. Scattered through the vine work are sage and pistachio greens in the leaves, a soft blue-grey in the guard stripes and in the small pendant cartouches, and small hits of salmon, peach and rust in the blossom hearts. The palette is warm overall, so it sits well with cream, camel, walnut and brass, and the navy border gives it enough contrast to work in a room with black or bronze metal accents.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was made in China, in the silk weaving workshops that adopted the Tabriz medallion cartoon and have been producing it to a high standard for decades. Calling it an Oriental rug is the accurate description: the layout comes from the northwest weaving tradition, the hands and the silk are Chinese. The photograph of the folded back with a ruler laid across it tells the real story of the weave. The knotting is small and even, the rows are perfectly straight, and the pattern on the reverse is as sharp as it is on the face, which is what lets the weaver draw a medallion with that many concentric petal rings without the curves going ragged. Fringes are the warps themselves, hand-secured and even at both ends, and the selvedges are tight and undamaged. For a buyer who wants the look and sheen of a fine silk floor piece at a fraction of what a comparable workshop silk costs, this is exactly where the value sits.