8'9" x 19'6" Persian Sarough Rug | Antique Lavar Design | Navy Gallery Size, Circa 1900s

This is an antique gallery-format piece from the early 1900s, 8'9" x 19'6", woven in the Sarouk Lavar manner on a cotton foundation with a wool pile that still stands full and even across the whole 234 inch length. The proportion is what makes it unusual: more than twice as long as it is wide, built for a long dining room, a library, a gallery hall or a broad landing where a standard 9x12 would sit short at both ends. The pile has kept its silky handle, the navy has stayed deep rather than going flat, and a small woven inscription sits low in the right side of the field. Pieces this long in this condition rarely surface, and buyers looking at oversize Persian rugs will know how few genuine antique examples reach the market at 19 feet and beyond. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion. Instead the field carries the classic detached-spray layout of the finest Sarouk drawing: upright floral bouquets, curling vine arms that close into hooks and volutes, serrated leaves, single rosettes floating free, and tall boteh forms drawn in outline. The repeats mirror from side to side and from end to end, which keeps a 19'6" field reading as one composition rather than a run of copied panels. Four large scrolling brackets anchor the quarters of the field, and slender flowering stems climb the center line between them. The main border is broad and open, a continuous meander of flowerheads and leaf sprays, framed by narrow guard stripes of small blossoms on a dark ground. A rust-toned inner band separates field from border and repeats the palmettes at a smaller scale.

Color Palette

The field is a saturated midnight navy with an indigo cast that shifts toward royal blue where the light catches the pile, visible in the angled photographs. Against it, the ornament is drawn in camel gold, wheat, soft yellow and antique ivory, with turquoise and teal used for the inner petals of the blossoms and for the small leaves along the vines. Warm terracotta, salmon rose and muted brick rust carry the inner band and reappear through the field as accents on the palmettes and the stems. The main border shifts to a light camel gold that photographs as beige in the flat overhead view and warms considerably in the close-up shots, with its own blue and rust flowers scattered across it. The outer border returns to navy, so the whole rug closes on the same dark tone it opens with. Total contrast between dark ground and gold ornament is high, which is exactly why this palette reads well in a low-light room.

Origin and Weave

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of west central Persia, and around the turn of the last century its looms produced the heavy, tightly packed, thick-piled weaving that American buyers built entire rooms around. In the trade, Lavar is the designation reserved for the most finely drawn examples, the ones where the vine work keeps a true curve instead of stepping. This rug belongs to that group: the knotting is dense enough to hold the thin outlines around every leaf, and the wool has the natural sheen that good Arak fleece keeps for a century. If you want the longer background on the type, read our guide to Persian Sarough rugs, and for the markers that place a piece in a period, see how to date an Oriental rug. A century on, this one still lies flat, still has full pile from selvedge to selvedge, and still looks like what it was made to be.