8' x 11'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool & Silk on Silk Foundation | 500 KPSI, Never Used

A workshop Tabriz woven in the 2000s at approximately 500 knots per square inch, with a wool and silk pile knotted onto a full silk foundation. The piece has never been laid in a home: the pile still stands upright and even, the ivory fringe is clean and untrimmed, and the selvages are tight the whole way around. At 8' x 11'9" it covers a standard seating group or a ten-seat table without crowding the walls, and the silk foundation keeps it noticeably lighter and more supple in the hand than a cotton-based rug of the same dimensions. It ships with our certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, knot count and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The centre carries an 8 point star medallion built in three concentric rings: a pale silk-highlighted rosette core, a navy ground set with cusped cartouches of rose palmettes, and an ivory outer star edged in fine black outline. Matching quarter medallions fill the 4 corners, and slender pendant finials drop from the head and foot of the medallion into the field. Between them the ground is worked as a true all-over pattern rather than open red: curling vine, small 8 petal rosettes, split palmettes and tiny blossoms repeat at a scale fine enough that the drawing stays crisp, which is only possible at this knot count. The main ivory border runs a red vine through alternating fan palmettes and cornflower heads, framed by seafoam green guard stripes and a narrow navy outline, and the drawing turns the corners cleanly with no interrupted repeat.

A Ruby Red Field Framed in Ivory

The field is a deep ruby red that darkens toward wine under lamplight and warms considerably in daylight. Against it the palette is unusually cool for a red Tabriz: ivory and oyster in the vine work, seafoam and celadon green in the guard stripes and spandrels, a strong indigo navy in the medallion ground and in scattered leaves, and soft rose, dusty pink and pale sky blue in the flower heads. The silk is used selectively rather than everywhere, in the rosette centres, the vine outlines and parts of the medallion, so those passages flash light while the wool around them stays matte. The border is a clean unwashed ivory, which keeps a hard bright edge around the red and makes the rug read lighter in a room than the field alone would suggest.

Tabriz Weaving and the Silk Foundation

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organised weaving city for centuries, working to the Raj system with cartoon-drawn designs and a hooked knife that lets a weaver hold a very high knot count across a large loom. Approximately 500 knots per square inch puts this piece well above commercial city production and into the grade the better Persian Tabriz rugs are judged on. The silk foundation is what makes that density practical: silk warps are thinner and stronger than cotton, so more knots fit across the same width and the rug lies flatter and drapes better for its size. The back, shown against a ruler in the last photograph, is tight and regular with no lazy lines, and the flat-woven ivory kilim ends are finished with a small woven motif, the mark of a workshop that finished the piece as carefully as it wove it.