7' x 10'7" Persian Bijar Rug | Cream Floral Medallion | Rose Bouquets | 1990s

Bijar weavers rarely give you a light field, which is the first thing worth noticing about this 7' x 10'7" rug. The cream ground is packed edge to edge with roses and vine, framed by a deep navy border, and the whole thing sits on the heavy, board-flat handle that only a Persian Bijar rug has. Woven in the 1990s with a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation, it is in excellent condition with full, even pile and clean ivory fringes at both ends. At 84" by 127" it works as a primary room rug where other 7x10 Persian rugs would be the obvious default choice. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a round medallion built from 8 brown vine-drawn cartouches, each one filled with a navy pocket and a spray of open roses, circling a small light blue and pink rosette at the exact middle. Long brown pendants run out to the sides, and the cream field around them is worked in a dense all-over lattice of rose bouquets, serrated leaves, carnations and thin flowering vine that never repeats in an obvious way. The 4 corners are filled by large navy spandrels carrying pale cream arabesque scrollwork, ivory palmettes and more roses, which is what gives the rug its strong frame from across a room. The main navy border runs a continuous procession of rose sprays, palmettes and leafy vine, flanked by light blue guard stripes of small rosettes and a narrow reciprocal ivory stripe, with the red selvedge closing the whole composition.

A Cream Field Read Against Navy and Rose

The ground is a warm cream, closer to unbleached wool than to a cold white, and it lifts every colour drawn on top of it. Roses are worked in burgundy, deep rose and clear pink with paler pink highlights, while the leaves move between olive green, sage and a soft blue green. Navy blue does the heavy structural work in the spandrels, the medallion pockets and the main border, and the light blue guard stripes and the powder blue touches inside the central rosette keep the dark tones from closing in. Brown handles the outlines of the medallion and the larger vines, red appears in the selvedge and in scattered blossoms, and small hits of gold and rust turn up in the border rosettes. Seen at a distance in the floor photographs the rug reads cream and navy; up close, in the detail shots, it reads as a whole garden of pink, burgundy and green.

Bijar, the Iron Rug of Persia

Bijar sits in the Kurdish highlands of northwestern Persia, and its weavers are known for beating each row of knots down with a heavy metal comb, wetting the wool as they work so it packs solid against the cotton warps. The result is the densest, heaviest hand-knotted rug in the country, the piece collectors call the iron rug of Persia, and the reason a Bijar outlasts almost anything else on a floor. What makes this one less typical is the drawing: instead of the usual geometric herati, the workshop used a fully curvilinear rose and vine composition of the kind associated with the finer Halvai villages, which demands a much tighter weave to keep the curves smooth. If you are comparing Bijar production areas, our Bijar, Zanjan, Tekab and Bukan comparison explains how the weaves differ, and you can see the rest of our stock in the Persian Bijar rugs collection.