7'3" x 11' Persian Sarough Rug | All-Over Floral Coral Red Field | 1990s Excellent Condition

This 7'3" x 11' piece is a classic room-size Sarough from the 1990s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a full 3/8" pile with no thin spots or repairs. The field is an uninterrupted floral lattice rather than a single medallion, which is why it sits so comfortably under furniture: there is no center to block and no pattern that fights a sofa or a dining table. The drawing is dense but easy to read, the wool has the slightly waxy sheen that good Arak-area fleece develops with age, and the selvedges and ivory cotton fringe are intact on all 4 sides. Honest collector reading on Persian Sarough rugs and what separates a workshop piece from a commercial one is worth a few minutes before you buy. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is laid out as a staggered all-over lattice built from large palmettes, curved boteh leaf forms, 8 petal rosettes and sprays of serrated leaves, each bouquet detached and floating on open ground in the way Sarough weavers favor. The pattern mirrors across the vertical axis, and in the middle of the rug the bouquets close into a loose lozenge that reads as a soft medallion without ever hardening into one, visible in the close-up photograph. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a narrow reciprocal edge stripe, a teal-blue guard woven with pink blossoms and gold vine, then the wide ivory main border with alternating large rosettes and curling acanthus, a second blue floral guard, and a thin pinstripe against the coral outer edge. The corners are resolved cleanly, with the main border motif turning rather than being cut, which is a good sign of a drawn cartoon instead of a loose village improvisation.

Color Palette

The ground is coral red, lighter and warmer than the tomato reds of most Persian city weaves, with a faint salmon blush that photographs pink in daylight and deepens toward brick under lamplight. Against it the weavers set 2 distinct blues: a cool navy used for leaf tips, outlines and the small pinnate sprays, and a mid teal-blue that carries the inner and outer guard bands and gives the border its depth. Cream and ivory do the structural work, filling the flower heads in the field and forming the broad main border ground, while beige softens the transition between the ivory border and the coral edge. Pink appears inside the border blossoms and in the heart of several field rosettes, and a muted old gold runs through the leaves and vine scrolls, warming the whole palette. If you are shopping the warm end of the spectrum, this sits squarely within the red and burgundy Persian rugs family while reading far lighter in a room than a true burgundy would.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Sarough is a weaving district in Markazi province of west central Persia, in the villages around Arak, and it built its name on exactly this combination: a heavy, tightly packed wool pile over a strong cotton foundation, drawn in curvilinear floral designs rather than tribal geometry. Sarough wool is famously springy and hard-wearing, which is why so many 1920s American Sarough rugs are still in service a century later, and why a 1990s piece like this one is realistically at the beginning of its life rather than the end. The back photograph shows the weave clearly: a regular, fine-grained knot face with no slubs or skipped rows, the hallmark of a workshop loom working to a drawn cartoon. The 3/8" pile is even from end to end, the ends are secured and straight, and the lay of the wool is consistent, meaning the rug was handled and stored properly rather than worn in one traffic lane.