8'4" x 11'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ruby Red Floral Medallion | Wool & Silk 400 KPSI, Never Used

This is a workshop grade Tabriz from the 2000s that has never been laid on a floor, and it shows in the pile: the wool still stands upright, the silk accents still throw light, and the ivory fringe at both ends is clean and untouched. At 8'4" x 11'7" it is a true room size piece, woven at roughly 400 knots per square inch on a cotton foundation, which is the level where the Tabriz drawing office stops compromising and the curved line stays curved all the way through the vine. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed 8 point star medallion built in concentric rings, with a small coral rosette at the exact heart, a wreath of curling leaves around it, and a scalloped outline stepped in gold, navy and ivory. Cusped pendants rise and fall from the medallion on the long axis, each one drawn as a narrow palmette cartouche. The field around it is not left empty: it carries a full all over lattice of thin vine scroll, rosettes, split palmettes, saz leaves and tiny buds, all drawn in the curvilinear style rather than the angular village manner. The 4 corner spandrels are worked in blush pink and pale sage with dense flower clusters, giving the field a visible rectangular reserve. The main border is a broad navy band of arabesque scrollwork and cloudband tendrils punctuated by large palmettes, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes of alternating rosettes and a fine reciprocal meander at the outer edge.

A Ruby Red Field Against Navy and Sage

The field is a deep ruby red, warm rather than orange, and it reads slightly different from each end of the room because the silk highlights in the flowerheads flip between light and dark as you walk around the rug. The medallion sits on a soft sage green ground, which is the unusual note here and the reason the center reads as a separate jewel rather than as more of the same field. Around those 2 anchors the palette works through ivory and cream in the guard borders, blush pink and salmon in the spandrels and the larger palmettes, saffron gold in the medallion outline, bottle green in the leaf work, and small strikes of sky blue in individual rosettes. The main border is the darkest value in the rug, a near black navy that gives the whole composition its hard frame and keeps the red from spreading visually past the edge.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in Azerbaijan in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's design capital for centuries, the town where the cartoon is drawn before a single knot is tied. Weavers there measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches: 40 Raj is commercial work, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch as on this piece, is where a rug enters collector territory. That density is what allows the thin vine stems and the graded shading inside the medallion to hold their shape at this scale. The pile is fine wool with silk worked into the highlights, knotted on a cotton warp and weft that keeps the rug flat and true, and the handle is firm without being stiff. Buyers working to this footprint can compare it with our other 8 x 11 Persian rugs, though few of them arrive unused with the pile still at full height.