7'3" x 10'5" Antique Persian Tabriz Rug | Salmon Field, Ivory Floral Border | All-Over Design

This is an old Tabriz that has done its living and come out the better for it. The field has settled into a warm salmon, somewhere between coral and soft brick, and it carries an all-over floral drawing rather than a single central medallion, which is why the rug reads as quiet furniture instead of a statement piece. Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, it measures 7'3" x 10'5", a genuinely useful room size that sits comfortably under a sofa group or a 6 seat table. If you are weighing it against other 7 x 10 Persian rugs, what separates this one is age: the dyes have mellowed the way only decades on a floor can mellow them. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction, and if you want to understand the signs we look at, our guide on how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through them.

Design and Motifs

The field is worked as a repeating floral lattice, one of the classic all-over rug designs of northwest Persia. Broad palmettes alternate with open rosettes, long serrated lancet leaves curve between them, and thin vine work ties the whole surface together so the eye never stops on one point. Small navy diamond cartouches punctuate the center line, each filled with a pale star, and ivory scrolling arches rise along the sides like the ghost of a panel design. The main border is ivory and carries a procession of 8 petal flowerheads and leafy palmettes in navy, teal and rust, framed on both sides by narrow guard stripes of small rosettes on a soft tan ground. Look at the 4 corners and you can see where the weaver adjusted the repeat to make the border turn, the honest kind of correction that only exists in hand-knotted village and workshop weaving.

The Salmon, Ivory and Navy Palette

Salmon is the governing color, and it is not a flat salmon: it drifts from a warmer terracotta at the ends toward a dusty coral through the middle, with faint grey green passages where the wool took the dye differently. Against that, the ivory border reads almost white in daylight and gives the rug its crisp outline. The drawing itself is carried in deep navy and inky indigo for the outlines and the small cartouches, mid blue and teal for the leaves, sage and olive for the vine work, and cream to pale straw for the flowerheads, with occasional rust and soft rose picking out petals. It is a warm, low contrast palette overall, the kind that sits easily with oak and walnut floors, cream plaster walls, brass and leather. A few passages of true blue in the field keep the salmon from tipping into pink.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in Persian Azerbaijan, in the far northwest, and has been the commercial and artistic engine of Persian weaving for centuries. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the town's workshops are known for drawing curved vine and palmette work accurately at that scale, something coarser weaving cannot do. This piece shows the traits you want from the group: a tight, flat cotton foundation visible on the reverse, an even low pile that follows the drawing cleanly, and wool that still has a faint sheen after decades of use. The back reads crisply enough that the border flowerheads are legible from behind, always the first thing we check. You can see more of the group among our antique Persian Tabriz rugs, but few of them arrive with a field this softly aged.