8'2" x 10'1" Mahi Tabriz Design Area Rug | Wool & Silk Fish Herati Lattice | Brand New

This is a brand new, never used hand-knotted Oriental rug woven in the Mahi Tabriz idiom, with a wool and silk pile on a cotton foundation. At 8'2" x 10'1" it sits squarely in the most useful of the 8x10 area rug footprints, large enough to carry a full seating group or a table with chairs pulled out, while the drawing stays fine enough to reward a close look. The pile is short and tightly packed, the handle is firm, the selvages are clean and the ivory cotton fringe is untouched, exactly as you would expect from a piece that has never been on a floor. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is genuine hand-knotted work.

Design and Motifs

Mahi means fish, and the whole field here is built from the Herati lattice that gives the design its name: a repeating diamond trellis, each cell holding a small rosette flanked by 4 curved lanceolate leaves that read as fish circling a pond. Nothing in that lattice is lazy. It runs unbroken across the entire field, pivots correctly at the scalloped edge of the central cartouche and picks up again in the spandrels without losing its rhythm. At the center sits a large ivory diamond medallion with a heavily serrated outline, filled with its own miniature lattice and crowned by a camel-toned 8 petal rosette holding palmettes, curled leaves and tiny blossoms. Matching pendant rosettes hang above and below the medallion on the long axis, with a pair of smaller half rosettes set into the field at each side. The main border is an ivory ground carrying an alternating procession of boteh-like cartouches and broad serrated acanthus leaves, framed by camel guard bands of small connected flowerheads, narrow blue and black minor stripes and a solid black outer edge that squares the whole composition off cleanly.

A Black Field With Camel, Ivory and Rust

The color scheme works in two clear layers. Inside the large scalloped cartouche the ground is a deep, near-ink black, and against it the lattice sparkles in rust red, ivory and soft olive, with tiny cream quatrefoils punctuating each diamond so the dark field never reads as a solid mass. Outside the cartouche the field shifts to a warm camel brown with a rosy cast, carrying the same lattice in rust, olive, ivory and charcoal, which makes the black center feel as though it is floating. The medallion is ivory moving to cream, its inner rosette a dusty camel with olive, teal blue, brick red and cream detail, and the border repeats that same ivory with rust, sage olive, slate blue and brown accents. The silk is used where it counts, on the outlines and the leaf tips, so the pattern edges catch light while the wool ground stays matte. Placed on a dark hardwood floor the camel comes forward; on pale stone or a light oak the black center dominates.

Woven in India in the Tabriz Mahi Tradition

This piece is honestly and openly made in India, and that is a mark in its favor rather than a compromise. India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced, and the best Indian workshops weave the classic Mahi fish design to a standard of drawing and knot density that would have been reserved for city workshops a generation ago. The Herati lattice is the hardest test of any Mahi weaver, because a single miscounted knot pushes the whole trellis out of line across 10 feet of field, and here the grid holds true from selvage to selvage. The pile is clipped low so the fine outlines stay legible, the wool is springy with good luster, the silk accents sit flush with the wool rather than standing proud, and the back shows a tight, even knot face on a cotton foundation. It is a new rug built to be used, dense underfoot and easy to live with in a room that sees daily traffic.