8'2" x 11'6" Persian Heriz Rug | Brick Red Geometric Medallion | Hand-Knotted Wool, Excellent Condition

This 8'2" x 11'6" Persian Heriz is the version of the design most buyers picture when they say they want a red Persian rug: a brick red field, one commanding stepped medallion, ivory corners, and wool with real body underfoot. The drawing is confident and the spacing is generous, so the rug fills a standard living or dining room without fighting the furniture, which is one reason 8x11 Persian rugs in this format are the hardest size group to keep in stock. The pile is even across the field, the ends and sides are intact, and the colors have settled into the soft, lived-in tone that only real use and real dyes produce. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming a hand-knotted wool pile on a cotton foundation, woven in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The field is built around a single large stepped medallion that reaches almost the full width of the rug, outlined in ivory so the silhouette snaps away from the red ground. At its heart sits an 8 petal rosette in grey and ivory, flanked by olive cartouches filled with little cypress and leaf forms, and the medallion arms break outward into hooked, angular palmettes rather than curved vines. Four matching ivory spandrels close the corners, each carrying a tall vase form, teal rosettes and serrated leaves, and all 4 corners resolve cleanly against the border. The open red ground between medallion and corners is not empty: it carries detached hooked leaves, small star rosettes and brown and olive palmettes drawn in the straight-line village vocabulary that defines true geometric Persian rugs. The indigo main border runs a chain of hexagonal rosettes and angular vinework between narrow ivory and rose guard stripes, a frame that holds the whole composition without competing with it.

Brick Red, Indigo and Olive: the Palette Up Close

The ground is a warm brick red that shifts between a rose-tinted tone where the light catches the pile and a deeper terracotta where it lies flat, the gentle variation you only get from wool dyed in small lots. Against it the main border reads near-black indigo, cooling the whole rug and keeping the red from turning sweet. The medallion and the scattered palmettes bring in a dusty olive and a soft mustard gold, the single most important color note in this piece because it bridges the red and the blue. Soft slate grey and a muted teal green appear in the cartouches, the corner vases and the little rosettes, with clean ivory used as outline and as the full ground of the 4 spandrels so the geometry stays legible from across the room. Small touches of salmon pink, cocoa brown and a dark aubergine fill in the minor motifs. In a room with warm wood, leather or cream walls the red dominates; under cooler north light the olive and indigo come forward and the rug reads considerably more subdued.

Heriz Weaving East of Tabriz

Heriz is a cluster of weaving villages in northwest Persia, east of Tabriz on the slopes below Mount Sabalan. The water there runs through mineral-rich rock, and local lore and long experience both credit it for the wool: famously tough, high in lanolin, and slow to show traffic, which is why Heriz rugs end up in the busiest rooms of a house and stay there for generations. Weavers work from memory on a sturdy cotton foundation rather than from a fully painted cartoon, so the line stays straight and angular, the medallion is stepped instead of lobed, and small asymmetries between one corner and the next are part of the record of the hand. Village knotting here is normally coarser than the city looms of nearby Persian Tabriz rugs, and that is the point: a heavier knot and a substantial pile are exactly what make this rug a floor rug you can live on, not a wall piece. The close-up with the ruler shows the knot structure plainly, row by row, with no machine regularity anywhere in it.