8'9" x 11'2" Persian Heriz Rug | Geometric Medallion | Semi-Antique Estate Piece

This is a village Heriz of the kind American families bought a generation or two ago and then wore into the floor without ever wearing out, an estate piece that has come back to us with an even 3/8" wool pile and full, honest condition. It measures 8'9" x 11'2", hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a heavy wool pile, and it carries the classic Heriz formula: a red field, a large ivory and black star medallion, and ivory corner spandrels drawn in straight, confident lines. The wool has the slight color movement that only comes with age and use, which is exactly what collectors want in a piece like this. Every rug ships with our certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is pure Heriz: everything is built from straight lines and stepped angles, with no curved arabesque anywhere. A large stepped diamond frames the center of the field, and inside it sits an 8 lobed star medallion worked in ivory and graphite black, each lobe filled with a serrated leaf and a small red cross at the very center. Above and below the medallion, twin black anchor pendants reach out into the field. The red ground between them is filled with angular vine scroll, hooked leaves, comb-tooth palmettes and small ivory birds and blossoms, all of it drawn freehand by the weaver rather than copied point for point, so the two halves of the field are close but never identical. The 4 corners carry big ivory spandrels packed with serrated leaf forms and a deep indigo cartouche at each inner tip. The main border runs on a graphite black ground with alternating rosettes and turtle palmettes in red, camel and ivory, flanked by narrow vine-and-blossom guard stripes. If this angular vocabulary is what you are after, it is the defining trait of geometric Persian rugs.

A Study in Red, Ivory and Graphite Black

The field is a madder red that moves between brick and a softer rose depending on where you stand, with faint horizontal variation across the width that tells you the wool was dyed in small lots and spun by hand. Against it, the ivory of the medallion lobes and the corner spandrels reads as a warm cream rather than a bright white, closer to unbleached wool, and it is what gives the rug its light. Graphite black does the structural work: it outlines the medallion, fills the anchor pendants, and carries the whole main border, which keeps the red from spreading edge to edge. Inside those dark grounds sit real indigo blues, from a deep navy to a clear mid-blue in the cartouches at the corners, plus camel and walnut brown in the leaves and a scattering of terracotta and dark plum. The overall balance is warm and saturated, and it sits comfortably with wood floors, leather, brass and dark cabinetry.

Heriz: The Villages Below Mount Sabalan

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz in northwest Persia, sitting below Mount Sabalan on ground where the water runs heavy with minerals. Local weavers have always credited that water and the mountain pasture for the wool, which is coarser and far tougher than the fine fleece used in the city workshops, and it is the reason a Heriz can sit in a front hall or under a dining table for 50 years and still have pile. The weave is a single-knot village structure on a cotton warp and weft, worked from memory and a remembered layout rather than a cartoon, which is why the medallion here is slightly off-square and the field motifs shift from one side to the other. That is not a fault, it is the signature of the work. At 8'9" x 11'2" this one covers a full seating group with the front legs of the furniture on the rug, and the dense wool will take that traffic without complaint.