8' x 10'6" Persian Heriz Rug | Deep Red Geometric Medallion | 1980s Vintage Wool

This is a village Heriz from the 1980s, woven on a cotton foundation with a heavy wool pile that still stands full and even across all 84 square feet. The drawing is confident and hand-drawn rather than copied from a fine cartoon: a stepped central medallion, big ivory corner spandrels, and a field so crowded with small geometric figures that you keep finding new ones. At 8' x 10'6" it sits in the most useful proportion in the trade, large enough to hold a sofa and two chairs with the front legs on the rug, and it belongs with the 8x11 Persian rugs most buyers shop for a main living space. Every rug we sell, including this one, ships with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials, age and exact measurements.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic medallion and corner composition of the Heriz villages, drawn entirely in straight lines and angles. At center sits a stepped diamond medallion framed by an 8 petal rosette of ivory leaf forms, each one filled with small blue and olive feathering, and inside it a camel outlined cross with a tiny red cartouche at the core. Four large ivory spandrels close off the corners with serrated vine, hooked leaves and stylized blossoms, and the open red field between them is packed with angular vinery, candle and tree figures, hooked H shapes and little diamond rosettes. Three borders carry the design out: a wide navy main border with reciprocal palmettes and camel ground medallions, flanked by narrow red and ivory guard stripes with running vine. This is the kind of bold, large scale drawing that puts the rug squarely among geometric rugs rather than the curvilinear city workshops, and the small irregularities in the repeat are the signature of a weaver working from memory.

A Deep Red Field with Navy, Ivory and Olive

The field is a true deep red, closer to cherry and brick than to rose, and it shifts slightly across the width in the way good wool and natural dyeing always does. Against it, the main border reads almost black navy, with a near charcoal outline around the medallion that gives the center its weight. The ivory is a warm unbleached cream, not white, and it does the heavy lifting: the four spandrels, the medallion rosette and the small ivory accents scattered through the field all pull the eye through the composition. Olive to camel brown fills the border rosettes, the vine stems and the medallion outline, while a medium cornflower blue and a soft salmon pink appear in the smaller figures, visible best in the corner and pile close-ups. The whole palette is firmly in the family of red and burgundy Persian rugs, and it works as well against white walls and modern furniture as it does in a traditional room.

Heriz: The Weaving Villages Below Mount Sabalan

Heriz is a cluster of villages east of Tabriz in northwest Persia, sitting below Mount Sabalan, and its reputation rests on two things. The first is the wool, which grows coarse and springy on sheep drinking the mineral rich water of the region, and which takes dye deeply and resists crushing for generations. The second is the drawing: Heriz weavers work in angular, straight line geometry on a coarser knot count than the city workshops, usually under 200 knots per square inch, because the design was never meant to be fine. It was meant to be strong. This piece shows exactly that, with a thick pile, a firm handle you can feel in the folded photographs, and a tight even back with original selvages and ends. The 1980s dating is consistent with the wool, the dye saturation and the construction, and if you want to understand how pieces like this are placed in time, our guide to how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used.