8'6" x 11'6" Sino Bijar Oriental Rug | Ivory Diamond Medallion, Herati Field | Brand New Hand-Knotted Wool

This 8'6" x 11'6" Sino Bijar is a heavy, tightly packed hand-knotted Oriental rug built on a cotton foundation with a dense 3/8" wool pile. The drawing is the classic Bijar formula: a broad ivory diamond frame floating on a dark, minutely patterned field, with a three-band border system carrying rosettes and palmettes. It has never been on a floor, the pile stands full and even from end to end, the selvages are clean and the ends are finished with hand-tied ivory fringe. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is 100% hand-knotted, along with its exact measurements, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

The whole field is drawn in the Herati pattern, also called mahi or the fish pattern: a lattice of small diamonds, each one enclosing a rosette and flanked by 4 curved lanceolate leaves that read like fish circling a pond. It repeats across the entire ground as a true all-over design, which is why the rug never looks empty no matter how furniture is arranged on it. Sitting over that field is a wide open-ivory diamond frame, elongated to follow the length of the rug, with stepped points reaching toward all 4 corners and a small paired pendant at the top and bottom tips. Inside the diamond the Herati repeat continues at the same scale, so the medallion reads as a window rather than a separate panel. The main border carries a procession of turquoise and brown palmette cartouches alternating with 8 petal rosettes on a red ground, framed by narrow reciprocal vine stripes and a fine barber-pole guard, and the whole thing is squared off with a plain dark outer stripe before the fringe.

A Deep Ground Framed in Ivory and Red

The ground is the darkest note in the rug, a near-black mud brown that picks up an indigo cast in daylight and lets every small motif read as a point of light. Against it the Herati rosettes are worked in cream, soft apricot, dusty rose and a muted sage, with turquoise used sparingly on the leaves so the field flickers rather than shouts. The diamond frame is a clean undyed ivory, the single largest area of light in the composition, and it is outlined in darkish red and brown so the edge stays crisp. That same darkish red fills the main border and the inner guard stripes, a deep oxide tone closer to brick and garnet than to bright scarlet. Turquoise appears again in the border palmettes and in the small diamonds of the reciprocal stripes, and the fringe and the outer selvage keep to ivory and near-black. In practice this is a dark rug with a bright center: it grounds a pale room and gives a dark-floored room enough ivory and red to keep it from closing in.

Sino Bijar Weaving and Build Quality

Sino Bijar is the name given to Chinese workshop rugs woven to the old Bijar recipe: a cotton warp and weft, a wool pile clipped short at about 3/8", and a beat-down heavy enough that the rug has real weight and body in the hand. The reverse tells the story, with a clear, evenly spaced knot grid and the pattern reading almost as sharply on the back as on the front, which is the mark of a disciplined loom rather than a fast one. The short even clip is what lets the small Herati motifs hold their shape at this scale. These pieces were made for buyers who wanted the density and the drawing of a village Bijar in a large, room-filling format, and the best of them, like this one, hold up under heavy traffic for decades. Among hand-knotted Oriental rugs in this size, a dense wool Sino Bijar in unused condition is one of the more practical pieces you can put in a busy living room or under a dining table.