8' x 12' Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool and Silk on Silk Foundation | 500 KPSI, 1980s Never Used

This piece was woven in Tabriz in the 1980s and has never been put down on a floor. The pile is wool with silk, knotted on a full silk foundation at roughly 500 knots per square inch, which is workshop territory rather than village work, and you can read it in the way the vines turn without a single stepped line. Laid out at 8' x 12', it covers a formal room without the design shrinking; the star medallion sits dead center and the field carries all the way to the ivory border with no filler. The silk warps give the back a tight, papery feel and let the drawing stay sharp at this scale, which is exactly why a weaver chooses silk over cotton on a rug of this size. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and if you are sizing up options among large Persian rugs, this is one of the finer weaves you will find in an 8 by 12.

Design and Motifs

The center is an 8 point star medallion on a navy ground, built from layered sage green cartouches and pink palmettes that radiate out from a small ivory rosette at the very middle. Cypress-shaped pendants extend above and below, and the same vocabulary repeats in the 4 corner spandrels, so the eye reads the medallion twice over. Around it the burgundy field is filled edge to edge with scrolling vinework: curled acanthus leaves, open rosettes, tulip and carnation heads, and small hooked palmettes, all drawn at a scale fine enough that no two adjacent blossoms take the same color. The main ivory border runs a continuous meander of large flower heads on a thin blue vine, flanked by sage green minor borders with alternating blossoms and leaf sprays, then narrow pink and navy guard stripes that keep the whole frame from going soft. The ends finish with a plain kilim band and a small woven cartouche above the fringe.

Color: Burgundy, Ivory and Sage

The field is a deep burgundy, closer to wine than to brick, and the silk-blended knots pick up light so the ground shifts a shade or two depending on where you stand. Against it the palette is unusually cool for a red rug: sage and olive greens in the leafwork, navy in the medallion core and the vine outlines, chalk ivory in the border, and a run of soft rose, salmon and dusty lilac in the flower heads with small touches of pale blue and old gold. That mix is what keeps the rug from reading heavy. The ivory border acts as a bright frame and carries the same rose and sage notes back into the field, so the rug sits comfortably with cream walls, dark wood and warm metals. Anyone shopping red and burgundy Persian rugs should note how much green is actually in this one.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's commercial and technical center for court-style weaving since the Safavid period. Its workshops measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of width, and a rug at approximately 500 knots per square inch belongs to the upper end of that system, well above the 40 Raj commercial grade and into the range where the master weavers work from a full cartoon. The silk foundation is the tell: silk warps are thinner and stronger than cotton, so the weaver can pack more knots into the same width and hold a curved line through a flower stem without it going jagged. Combined with the silk highlights through the pile, which is standard practice in the best Persian silk rugs, the result is a rug that reads as a single continuous drawing rather than a grid of knots. Unused since the 1980s, the pile is full height and the colors have never been exposed to sun.