7'8" x 11' Persian Heriz Rug | Vintage 1980s Geometric Medallion | Rich Red & Ivory Wool

This is a village Heriz from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a full, even pile after four decades. The drawing is confident and entirely angular: a stepped 8 point star medallion at center, a rich red field crowded with hooked vines and small animal and bird figures, and two broad ivory corner fields that lift the whole composition. At 7'8" x 11" wide by 11' long it sits squarely in the most useful large format, and buyers shopping 8 x 11 Persian rugs will recognize it as the size that finally lets a sofa and two chairs all sit on the rug. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a crisp ivory star medallion with 8 points, built around a small squared rosette in red, gold and navy, and framed by a black diamond that throws the ivory forward. Serrated leaf pendants run off the medallion at top and bottom, each one drawn in black and ivory with a red palmette heart. Across the red field the weaver scattered hooked vines, small quadruped and bird figures, and tiny angular blossoms, the kind of free-hand filler that tells you this was drawn from memory rather than a workshop cartoon. The ivory corner spandrels repeat the same vocabulary in reverse, dark motifs on light ground. A wide black main border carries alternating rosettes and cartouche-like devices, flanked by olive-gold guard stripes and a fine reciprocal edge. Anyone drawn to this kind of angular drawing should also look at our other geometric Persian rugs.

The Red, Navy and Ivory Palette Up Close

The field is a deep tomato red that shifts toward brick where the light rakes across the pile, with passages of darker burgundy worked into the medallion frame and the field corners. Against it, the ivory reads warm and slightly creamy rather than stark white, so the corner fields glow instead of glaring. Navy and a saturated royal blue do the outlining work, holding every motif in place, and near-black is used for the main border ground and the medallion frame, which is what gives the rug its depth from across a room. Olive-gold runs through the guard stripes and the border tracery, visible clearly in the close-up of the folded edge, and small touches of soft rose, gray and camel appear in the filler figures. The overall effect is warm and high-contrast, easy to live with on dark hardwood and equally strong against pale walls, as the room photograph shows.

Heriz: The Villages East of Tabriz

Heriz is a cluster of weaving villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan in northwest Persia. The water there is mineral-rich and the local sheep grow famously tough, high-lanolin fleece, which is why a Heriz outlasts almost anything else on a floor that sees daily traffic. The weavers work in straight lines and stepped angles rather than the curved vine of the city ateliers, and they knot on a heavy cotton foundation with a good weight of wool above it. Village Heriz weaving typically runs under 200 knots per square inch, and that is by design: the point is durability and bold scale, not miniature detail. The back of this piece, shown in the photographs, is evenly knotted with clean rows and no bare patches, and the selvages and ends are intact. This one was woven in the 1980s and has aged into the mellow tone collectors look for, related in tradition to Persian Tabriz rugs but unmistakably its own village style.