8'2" x 10'2" Wool and Silk Mahi Tabriz Design Rug | Herati Fish Field | Brand New

This is a brand new, hand-knotted Mahi Tabriz design rug woven in India in wool with silk highlights, measuring 8'2" x 10'2" and never placed in a home. The drawing is the classic one: a small rosy brown medallion floating at the center of a field packed edge to edge with the herati, or fish, lattice, contained by a wide ivory palmette border. It is fine, flat and light in the hand for its size, with the silk catching the light along the medallion petals and the vine work. Photographs 11 and 15 show the reverse, where the knotting is even and tight enough to read every flower head from the back. It arrives with our certificate of authenticity, and at 8'2" x 10'2" it sits squarely in the most useful of all 8x10 area rugs for a main living space.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous herati lattice, the motif Persian weavers call mahi: a small diamond enclosing a rosette, flanked by 4 curved lanceolate leaves that read like fish circling a pool. It repeats in strict rows across the entire ground, tens of thousands of times, with no break and no filler. Over it sits a compact lobed medallion holding an 8 petal rosette in blue and red, surrounded by 4 large ivory palmettes and finished with a slender cusped finial at top and bottom. A large scalloped reserve outlines the medallion zone in a lighter tone, and matching quarter spandrels anchor the 4 corners. The main border runs an ivory ground with alternating round and shield shaped rosettes joined by serrated saz leaves and curling vine, framed by 2 pairs of narrow guard stripes carrying small floral heads on a soft brown ground. It is a disciplined, formal layout with nothing improvised about it, which is exactly the point of the Mahi drawing.

A Warm Beige, Brown and Rust Palette

Seen from across the room the rug reads as warm mid brown with a beige glow coming through it. Up close, in image 9, the field is actually ivory and cream, and the brown comes from the density of the outlines: deep chocolate and near black stems, burgundy and rust flower heads, soft taupe rosettes and small olive green leaves repeating in every diamond. The medallion warms to a dusty rose and salmon ground, with ivory and pale olive petals and a single teal blue center rosette, the coolest note in the whole rug. The border ground is a clean ivory that lifts the whole piece, with brick red, olive, charcoal and grey blue picked out in the palmettes. Guard stripes pick up a muted slate blue. The outer edge finishes in a plain sand beige selvedge band above natural ivory fringe. There is no harsh color anywhere here; it is an earth tone rug that will sit quietly with oak, walnut, cream upholstery and brass.

Made in India, Woven to the Mahi Tabriz Standard

India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced, and this piece shows why. The Mahi Tabriz drawing is unforgiving: the lattice has to stay square across 98 inches of width, or the eye catches the drift immediately, and it does not drift here. The weavers used a cotton foundation with a wool pile lifted by silk in the medallion, spandrels and border vine, which is what gives the surface its two tone shimmer as the light moves. The pile is clipped low so the small motifs stay legible, and the back in image 11 shows a fine, regular knot with a clean, straight selvedge and hand-tied fringe. If you are comparing this against similar goods, it belongs in the same conversation as any good Oriental rug of this scale, and it has never been walked on.