8'2" x 10'1" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Sage Bird Medallion | 60 Raj Wool & Silk, Never Used

This 8'2" x 10'1" Tabriz came out of a workshop loom and went straight into storage, so the pile still stands full and the ivory ground has never taken a footprint. It is a wool and silk weave on a cotton foundation, drawn at roughly 400 knots per square inch, which is why the vine work reads as clean curved line rather than stepped outline. Silk is used sparingly, placed in the blossom centers and the small leaf tips so the design catches light as you walk past it. A short woven inscription sits in the upper guard border, the mark of a named workshop rather than a village loom. The proportions land squarely in the most useful room size we sell, and buyers comparing 8x10 Persian rugs will find very few at this knot count. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered round medallion on a soft brown and sage ground, built out from a small rosette and ringed by two bands of tiny blossoms and lanceolate leaves before it breaks into a lobed sage outline with slender pendants top and bottom. Around it the ivory field is covered edge to edge with a symmetrical scrolling vine, carrying split-leaf arabesques, serrated saz leaves, palmettes and small rosettes, and tucked into that vine work are perched birds, drawn small enough that you find them one at a time rather than all at once. The 4 corner spandrels are sage green filled with gold cartouche panels, large feathered palmettes and more birds, and they frame the field without crowding it. The main border runs on an olive-sage ground with alternating shield cartouches and upright palmette bouquets, separated by scattered white blossoms, and it is fenced by narrow red and cream guard stripes that repeat a small meandering vine all the way around.

A Quiet Palette of Ivory, Sage Green and Antique Brown

The field is a warm ivory with a faint cream cast, not a stark white, and it is what makes the rug sit comfortably in a room with oak or walnut floors. Sage green does the structural work: it fills the spandrels, shades the border ground toward olive, and reappears in leaves throughout the field so the eye travels between border and center. Brown handles the outlines and the medallion ground, giving the drawing its definition and a slightly antique, sepia tone rather than a bright modern contrast. The accents are where it gets interesting, with dusty rose and burgundy in the palmettes, muted blue in the smaller blossoms and bird bodies, and old gold in the corner cartouches. There is no single loud color anywhere in the rug, which is the point. It is a light, low-contrast palette that works with grey, cream, camel and soft green upholstery and will not fight existing art or drapery.

Tabriz Weaving and the 60 Raj Standard

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's commercial weaving capital for centuries, with a workshop system that separates the designer, the dyer and the weavers on the loom. Tabriz measures fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches, and the grades matter: 40 Raj is ordinary commercial work, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is the point where a weaver can hold a true curve in a vine and put a recognizable bird into a space the size of a fingernail. This rug is woven at that 60 Raj standard, as the back in the last photo shows, with tight even rows and a cotton warp and weft that keep the rug flat and square. The wool is dense and springy underfoot, the silk is confined to highlights where it earns its keep, and the selvedges and cotton fringe are original and untouched.