8' x 11' Persian Heriz Rug | Antique All-Over Palmette Design | Hand-Knotted Wool

This is an antique Persian Heriz in a room size that almost never turns up with the pile still this even. Instead of the familiar big stepped medallion, the weaver filled the whole brick red field with a repeating architecture of palmettes, serrated leaves and blue rosettes, which is the harder of the two Heriz layouts to draw and the more interesting one to live with. Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, it measures 8' x 11' and sits squarely in the most useful of all 8 x 11 Persian rugs for a sofa-and-chairs grouping or a table for 6. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is a genuine hand-knotted Persian piece.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over design built from paired serrated leaves that curve toward each other like open scissors, anchored at intervals by 8 petal rosettes in mid blue and star-shaped palmettes in olive and rose. Long ivory feather leaves float at the top and bottom of the field and give the eye somewhere to rest against all that pattern. Small tendrils, buds and hooked vines fill the ground between the larger elements so there is no empty wool anywhere, a sign the cartoon was drawn by a confident hand rather than copied loosely. The main border on a near-black navy ground runs a rhythm of hexagonal rosette panels alternating with turtle-and-vine elements, enclosed by narrow ivory and rose guard stripes carrying a running flower head. The 4 corners resolve cleanly, which is not a given in village weaving and tells you the weaver planned the border count before she started.

Color: Brick Red, Navy and Ivory

The ground is a brick to terracotta red that shifts gently across the width, the natural abrash of hand-dyed wool from separate dye lots, and it is exactly what gives an old rug its life under changing light. Against it the weaver set dark navy, almost black in the border and in the shaded halves of the leaves, with ivory used sparingly and deliberately on the feather leaves, the guard stripe flowers and the outlines. The secondary palette is soft and dusty rather than bright: olive and sage green, a pale sky blue, a mid cornflower blue in the rosettes, salmon and soft rose in the smaller blossoms, and a deep chocolate brown in the leaf tips. Decades of light have taken the edge off the reds and greens, so the rug now sits comfortably with warm woods, cream walls, leather and both antique and contemporary furniture. Read in person it is a red rug, but a quiet, layered red, not a loud one.

Heriz: Weaving in the Villages East of Tabriz

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, where mineral-rich water is credited with the famously tough, high-lanolin wool that makes these rugs last generations under real traffic. The drawing tradition there is angular and confident, straight lines and stepped forms translated from finer city cartoons onto a village loom, and this piece keeps that discipline while pushing toward a more floral vocabulary than the standard medallion Heriz. The weave is the classic construction for the district, wool pile knotted on a cotton warp and weft, heavy in the hand and thick enough to take furniture without crushing. Handle, palette and the depth of patina all point to an older piece rather than a recent one; if you want to understand how weavers, dealers and appraisers read those clues, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same evidence we used here.