8'8" x 11'7" Persian Kerman Rug | Pomegranate Red Floral Medallion | 1970s Excellent Condition

Woven in the 1970s in southeast Persia, this 8'8" x 11'7" Kerman is the kind of piece Kerman built its name on: a wide, quiet field of deep pomegranate red wool, a single ornate floral medallion floating at the center, and a triple border so densely drawn that it reads almost like embroidery. The pile is full and even across the whole surface, the selvedges are sound, and the flat-woven ends are intact, which is why it grades out in excellent condition after five decades. At just under 9 feet by just under 12 feet it fits the standard 9 x 12 Persian rug footprint that most formal rooms are laid out around. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is classic Kerman drawing. A scalloped, cusped cartouche shape is cut into the red field, and inside it sits a lobed medallion built from pink roses, gold palmettes, ivory acanthus leaves and a blue tracery core, with a slender pendant spray reaching out above and below toward the ends of the field. Sprays of small 5 petal blossoms drift off the medallion into the open red ground, so the eye has somewhere to rest between the ornament. The 4 corners carry heavy ivory and gold scrollwork that turns inward onto emerald green ground, and the borders run in three bands: a narrow brown guard stripe, a rose-pink minor border of tiny flowerheads, and a wide navy main border filled with alternating green cartouches, rose bouquets and curling vine. The corner close-ups show how carefully the drawing resolves at each turn, with the vine meeting cleanly rather than being cut off, which is the mark of a workshop cartoon followed properly rather than improvised at the loom.

The Pomegranate Red, Green and Blue Palette

The field is a deep pomegranate red, slightly cooler and more wine-toned than a Kashan brick red, and it carries the gentle light-and-shade shift across the width that good hand-spun wool always shows when the pile is viewed from opposite ends. Against it the border palette does the heavy work: a true navy blue ground, bottle and emerald green panels, soft rose pink in the minor stripe, and warm cinnamon brown in the guard stripes. The ornament is picked out in ivory, butter gold and pale straw, with accents of sky blue, sage green, salmon and a muted lilac in the small blossoms. That balance of hot red against cool green and blue is exactly why a Kerman sits comfortably with both dark wood and painted furniture, and the touches of pink and gold keep the whole rug from reading heavy. Colors are stable and even end to end, with no abrash break or bleed anywhere in the field.

Kerman Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman lies on the high desert edge of southeast Persia and has been a weaving center for centuries, known for two things above all: exceptionally soft local wool and curvilinear drawing carried out from a designer's cartoon rather than from memory. Pictorial garden and rose borders are the Kerman signature, and the workshops there refined a floral vocabulary that decorators in America and Europe bought by the container through the middle of the last century. This piece belongs to that lineage. It is a workshop weave, single-knotted on a cotton foundation with a wool pile clipped at a medium height so the fine floral detail stays legible, and the reverse shown in the last photograph gives a clear, regular knot grid with no slack or skipped rows. If you are comparing Persian Kerman rugs, this one earns its place on the combination of an unusually clean open field, intact borders and a full pile at 50 years old.