8'2" x 8'2" Square Persian Sarough Rug | All-Over Floral Sprays on Navy | Ivory Border, 2000s

True squares are hard to find, and a true square in this weave is harder still. This Persian Sarough rug measures 8'2" x 8'2" on the nose, with a heavy wool pile knotted over a cotton foundation and a field of midnight navy carrying dozens of separate flower sprays. The handle is thick and dense, the kind of weight that makes the rug sit flat the moment it comes off the roll, and the pile has the slight sheen that good Arak-region wool develops. Woven in the 2000s and in perfect condition, it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted Persian piece. If a square is what the room needs, browse the rest of our square Persian rugs alongside it.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn in the classic Sarouk manner: no medallion outline dominating the composition, but a loose lattice of detached floral sprays, each one a small bouquet of open roses, buds, curled leaves and serrated foliage floating on the dark ground. At the center the sprays close ranks around a single 8 petal rosette set in a diamond of scrolling stems, which reads as a medallion from a distance and dissolves back into flowers up close. The sprays alternate in scale and direction across all 4 quarters, so the eye keeps moving instead of locking onto a repeat. The ivory main border runs a continuous vine of palmettes, rosettes and blue leafy fans, framed on both sides by narrow guard stripes of small blossoms on light blue and a fine reciprocal minor stripe in rose and navy. Corners are resolved cleanly, with the border vine turning without breaking the drawing.

A Navy Field Under Rose, Ivory and Green

The ground is a deep midnight navy, dark enough at a glance to read almost black, and it does the work of making every other color look brighter than it is. The flowers are built mostly from a soft coral rose that shades toward salmon on the petal edges, with cream and ivory highlights lifting the outlines and warm terracotta brown filling the larger leaf forms. Scattered through them are apple green and olive stems, a clear medium blue in the smaller blossoms and leaf tips, and touches of deeper red at the flower hearts. The border reverses the scheme entirely: an ivory to pale butter ground with the same rose, blue, olive and brown palette laid over it, which keeps the dark field from feeling heavy and gives the square a bright outer frame. Fringes are natural ivory, and the outer selvage is overcast in navy.

Sarough Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village north of Arak in central Persia, at the heart of the old Sultanabad weaving district that also produced Mahal and Lilihan rugs. Sarough weavers built their reputation on two things: heavy, well spun local wool and a tightly packed Persian knot on a cotton foundation, which is why these rugs survive generations of traffic while keeping their pile. The detached floral spray layout seen here is the pattern that made the name famous in American homes from the 1920s onward, and workshops in the region still weave it to the same drawing. Squares like this one require the loom to be set and beaten evenly across an unusually wide warp for the length, so a piece that finishes dead square at 8'2" x 8'2" reflects careful loom work rather than luck. The result is a dense, level, solidly built rug in the tradition it comes from.