8' x 11'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | Soft Coral Wool & Silk Medallion | 400 KPSI, Never Used

This one has never been walked on. Woven in a Tabriz workshop in the 2000s and rolled away rather than sold, it still has the full standing pile and the quiet silk sheen that a used rug loses in its first decade. The weave runs about 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, which is collector territory for Tabriz and the reason the vine work in the coral field stays thin and continuous instead of stepping. Pile is wool with silk carried through the highlights, knotted on a cotton foundation, and the back in the last photo shows how tight and even the rows sit. At 96 inches wide it covers a seating group or a full dining set without crowding, and it sits squarely in the practical 8x11 Persian rug range. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, knot count and the exact 8' x 11'6" measurement.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Tabriz workshop formula, drawn with more patience than most. A round lobed medallion sits dead center, its scalloped ivory ring built from small floral cartouches and closing on a pale blue heart with a single rosette at the very middle. A black lobed collar frames it and throws the ivory forward. Above and below, 2 pendant palmettes reach into the field on fine stems, and the 4 corners carry taupe and sage spandrels filled with large blossoms and split leaves, each one outlined so the corner reads as a separate panel. The open coral ground between them is not open at all on close inspection: it is a continuous all over lattice of hooked vine, tiny carnations, curled leaves and shaded palmettes, with the vine scrolls mirrored precisely across both axes. The main border repeats an alternating palmette and rosette chain on black, held between narrow ivory guard stripes of running vine, with a thin sage stripe outside those and a coral flatwoven edge finishing into hand-tied ivory fringe.

The Soft Coral and Black Color Story

The field is a soft coral, a rose-salmon that sits between terracotta and old brick and shifts warmer or cooler with the light and the direction of the pile. It is the whole reason this rug works: a harder tomato red would fight the black, but this coral reads almost like a warm blush and makes the near-black border look like a picture frame rather than a heavy edge. Inside the field the drawing is worked in ivory, pale sky blue, sage and olive green, camel, burgundy and small touches of deep brown, all of them muted so nothing jumps. The medallion pulls in the lightest values, ivory and that soft blue, so it glows against the coral from across the room. The border does the opposite job, packing burgundy, rose, turquoise and ivory blossoms onto black so the outline stays crisp. The silk highlights catch light in the palmettes and leaf tips, which is why the palette looks slightly different in every photograph.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the country's commercial and technical weaving capital for centuries, the city where the loom drawing and the cartoon matter as much as the wool. Tabriz quality is quoted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches: 40 Raj is ordinary commercial work, 50 is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is where a workshop is weaving for reputation rather than volume. That density is what allows the curved vine, the scalloped medallion outline and the shaded palmettes here to be drawn cleanly instead of squared off, and it is why the pile can be clipped low without losing detail. The wool is dense and springy, spun for hard use, and the silk highlights are used sparingly, only where the design wants a lift. Add the unused condition and this is a workshop Tabriz that has all of its life still ahead of it.