7'1" x 10'10" Persian Ardebil Rug | All-Over Diamond Lattice with Stepped Medallion | Excellent Condition

This 7'1" x 10'10" Persian Ardebil is the kind of piece that reads quiet from across the room and then rewards you the moment you kneel down on it. The whole field is a dense diamond lattice drawn over a pinkish brown ground, with a navy stepped diamond medallion anchoring the center and matching navy corner pieces closing off the four corners. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, with a firm, solid handle and a flat, even surface that tells you it was woven on a tight loom and beaten down properly row by row. Condition is excellent, the ends and sides are sound, and the ivory fringe is clean and original. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted piece made in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The field is laid out as a repeating diamond grid, each compartment outlined in dark wool and filled with a small hooked palmette or a stepped box, with tiny 4 petal and 8 petal rosettes dropped in at the intersections in rose, ivory and olive. It is a true all-over drawing, carried edge to edge without a break, and it belongs in the family of lattice patterns that weavers of the northwest work from memory rather than from a full cartoon. The stepped diamond medallion at the center is the one place the drawing changes scale: a navy ground, a crenelated outline, serrated pendants top and bottom, and a small ivory cartouche at the very core filled with hooked vines and pink blossoms. The four corner spandrels repeat that navy ground with ivory triangles at the inner tips. Around all of this run five bands, a wide brown main border carrying light blue arrow and vase figures, flanked by gold guard stripes and narrow light blue vine bands. If you like the discipline of a full lattice, this sits squarely with the best all-over rug designs and with the straight-line clarity of geometric Persian rugs.

Colors in Detail

The ground colour is the reason to buy this one. It sits between salmon and soft terracotta, a pinkish brown that warms up under lamplight and cools toward dusty rose in daylight, and the natural abrash across the field keeps it from ever looking flat or printed. Against that ground the medallion and corners read deep navy, almost ink at the outlines, with a violet cast where the wool has taken the dye unevenly. The small motifs inside the lattice carry mauve, rose pink, brick red, cream and a muted olive green, so at close range the field actually shimmers with half a dozen colours while at three paces it still reads as one calm warm tone. The borders bring in the two accents that lift the whole rug: a clear mid light blue in the vine bands and the main border figures, and a saturated mustard gold in the two guard stripes that frames everything. Ivory shows up as outlining, as the little stars in the main border and as the heart of the medallion. It is an unusually easy palette to live with, friendly to walnut and oak, to cream plaster and to grey upholstery alike, and distinct from the standard red and navy formula most buyers expect from a Persian rug of this size.

Ardebil Origin and Weaving Quality

Ardebil is the main town of the far northwest corner of Persia, up on the cold highland plateau near the Caspian side of the Azerbaijani border. The altitude and the long winters give the sheep there a long-staple, high-lanolin fleece, and that wool is the single biggest reason Ardebil rugs hold up the way they do: the pile resists crushing, takes a slight sheen with use, and does not shed its colour. Weavers in the town and the surrounding villages work on cotton warps with a single-knot technique and beat each row down hard, which is why this piece feels heavier in the hand than its 3/8" pile height suggests. The drawing tradition here is geometric by choice, not by limitation, built on straight lines, stepped outlines and repeating grids rather than the curved vine work of the central city workshops. On a 7'1" x 10'10" floor size that discipline pays off, because a lattice this regular needs the loom tension and the knot count to stay honest over 85 inches of width, and this one does. It is a rug for a room that gets used, and it will still be here long after the furniture around it has been replaced.