8'7" x 11'8" Wool & Silk Oriental Rug | All-Over Tabriz Floral Design | 200 KPSI

This is a workshop piece in the best sense: a hand-knotted wool and silk rug at approximately 200 knots per square inch, woven on a cotton foundation and never used. At 8'7" x 11'8" it covers a full seating group without crowding the walls, which is exactly why 9x12 area rugs remain the most requested size we carry. The silk is used as accent rather than as the whole pile, so the rosettes and vine tips catch the light while the wool ground keeps its matte depth and takes daily traffic. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field carries a full all-over floral design drawn in the Tabriz manner: a continuous lattice of thin curved vines that links open palmettes, layered rosettes and small serrated leaves across the entire ground, with no central medallion to interrupt the rhythm. Look closely and the repeat is not mechanical, the flower heads change scale and facing as the vine turns, and small bud clusters fill the spaces the larger blooms leave behind. The border system is unusually generous for a rug of this size: a wide black main border of connected palmettes and curling leaves, flanked by two ivory rosette guard stripes on each side, plus a narrow taupe vine band and a fine outer minor stripe. That stacked framing is what gives the rug its formal, framed-picture look when you stand back from it.

A Deep Red Field Held by Black and Ivory

The ground is a deep brick red with a wine cast, saturated rather than bright, and the silk accents inside the flower heads shift it lighter or darker depending on which way you walk. Against that red, the main border reads as a true black, dense enough to act as a hard edge, and the blossoms scattered through it come up in ivory, salmon, pale blue-grey and soft coral. The guard stripes are a warm ivory that runs toward cream and sand, which softens the jump from red to black instead of making it abrupt. Muted sage and olive green appear only in the leafwork and vine tracery, small in quantity but important, since the green is what keeps a red and black rug from feeling flat. The outer selvage and the cotton fringe finish in clean ivory.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was made in China, in a workshop that weaves classical Tabriz cartoons to a high standard and finishes them with clipped, level shearing so the drawing stays crisp. Among fine Oriental rugs, roughly 200 knots per square inch is the point where curved vine work can be drawn properly rather than approximated, and you can see the payoff in the thin continuous stems and the small floral repeats inside the guard stripes. The back detail photograph shows the knot density and the hand-knotted cotton fringe, tied and secured at the end rather than machine-serged. Wool for body, silk for highlight, cotton for a stable foundation: a straightforward, honest construction that should hold its shape and its color for decades of use.