8'9" x 11'3" Persian Yalameh Tribal Rug | Rust Red & Navy Diamond Lattice | Wool on Wool, Never Used

This is tribal weaving at full room scale: an 8'9" x 11'3" Yalameh knotted entirely in wool, warp, weft and pile, by weavers working from memory rather than a paper cartoon. The wool is the tell. Run a hand across the surface and the pile has the springy, slightly glossy handle that only comes from mountain-grazed fleece, and the back shows a firm, even weave with no slack rows. It has never been on a floor, so the pile stands at full height and the colors have not yet begun the slow mellowing that gives older tribal rugs their patina. At just under the standard 9x12 Persian rug footprint, it covers a generous seating area without swallowing a modest room. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is built from stacked columns of stepped diamonds, each one outlined in a sawtooth ivory band and filled with an 8 petal star rosette at its center. Around every rosette sit rows of latch hooks, little squared combs and paired hooked arms that read almost like stylized birds, a vocabulary the weavers of this district repeat rug to rug with small personal variations. Between the diamonds, the ground is scattered with 6 petal flowerheads in ivory, blue and golden beige. The corners break away into ivory spandrels holding single flowering plants and a small rosette apiece, and the whole field is framed by a rust main border of reciprocal vine and leaf forms with narrow flowerhead guards on both sides. Anyone drawn to strongly drawn geometric rugs will read this one instantly.

A Palette of Rust Red, Navy and Sky Blue

Color is what carries this rug across a room. The diamonds alternate between a warm brick rust red and a clear mid sky blue, and both sit on a deep navy ground that pushes them forward instead of flattening them. Ivory does the structural work: the sawtooth diamond outlines, the corner spandrels and the inner guard stripes are all drawn in undyed cream, which keeps the lattice legible from across a large space. The accents are where the tribal hand shows, with olive green, soft golden beige, pale peach and a touch of dark aubergine appearing inside the rosettes and hook motifs. Subtle abrash, the natural tonal shift from one dye lot to the next, moves gently through the blue ground and reads as depth rather than variation.

Yalameh Weaving in Southern Persia

Yalameh rugs come from the villages around Aliabad, in the country south of Isfahan toward Abadeh, woven by settled families descended from the Luri and Qashqai confederations of the Zagros. The construction is what separates them from lighter nomadic work: a symmetrical Turkish knot pulled tight over a wool warp and wool weft, beaten down hard, giving a dense, heavy handle and a rug that stands up to real traffic for generations. Flocks grazing at altitude produce a high lanolin fleece that takes dye brilliantly and resists soiling, which is why Yalameh pile keeps its luster. Among Persian tribal rugs, pieces this large and this evenly drawn are the exception, since most tribal looms are set for smaller formats.