8'2" x 10' Persian Tabriz Rug | Black Field, Dusty Rose Border | 60 Raj, 400 KPSI, Never Used

This 8'2" x 10' Persian Tabriz was woven in the 2000s and has never spent a day on a floor. It is a workshop piece at roughly 400 knots per square inch, which puts it at 60 Raj, the point where a Tabriz stops being a good rug and starts being a fine one. The pile is wool carrying silk through the highlights, so the drawing holds its edges and the lighter passages catch light at an angle, as you can see in the floor photographs. The black ground has no abrash, the dusty rose border has not softened, and the ivory guard stripes are still bright white rather than cream. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, knot count and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center is a 16 point starburst medallion built in layers: a small claret rosette at the core, an ivory ring of scrolling arabesque around it, then a dusty rose crown of pointed lobes tipped with tiny palmettes. Pendants run off the medallion top and bottom into the field. The black ground is not left open the way a Kashan often leaves it. Instead it is filled edge to edge with a fine all over vine, thin stems carrying rosettes, curled saz leaves, carnations and small serrated paisley heads that lean in different directions so the field never looks stamped. The 4 corners carry ivory cloud band cartouches set into shaded spandrels, a Tabriz device that separates the field from the border without a hard line. The main border is a turning vine of large palmettes and split leaves, flanked inside and out by ivory guard stripes of linked meander flowers. Count the drawing at the corners in the detail photo: the pattern resolves cleanly rather than being cut off, which is a cartoon and weaver discipline you only get from a real workshop.

Color: Black Ground Against Dusty Rose and Ivory

The field is a deep true black, dense and even, and it does the same job a dark gallery wall does: everything laid on top of it reads brighter. The border is a dusty rose, a muted antique pink with a brick undertone that photographs slightly warmer in close range than it looks across a room. Between the two sit the ivory guard stripes, and in the medallion a clean chalk white that keeps the center from going pink. The secondary palette is where the rug earns its money: olive and sage green in the leaves, a soft gray blue in the shaded palmettes, deep navy outlining in the small flower heads, touches of camel and old gold in the border foliage, and occasional pale peach and true red at the flower centers. Because the silk sits in the rose and ivory passages, those areas shift tone as you walk around the rug. It is a black rug that will not read heavy, and the rose border makes it sit comfortably with warm wood floors, cream walls, or grays.

Tabriz: Northwest Persia and the Raj System

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the city that supplied cartoons and master weavers to half the country. Tabriz quality is measured in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width. 40 Raj is the commercial grade sold by the container, 50 Raj is genuinely fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is where the collector grade begins, because the loom and the cartoon both have to be exact before a single knot is tied. That resolution is what allows the curved vine and the layered medallion here to stay smooth rather than stepped. At 8'2" x 10' it covers the standard footprint buyers shop when they search 8 x 10 Persian rugs, with enough surface to carry a sofa group front legs on or a table for 8 without crowding the border.