9'10" x 12'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Khesti Garden Panel Design | Semi Antique Sage Green Wool

This is a Bakhtiar at its most recognizable: a khesti garden field of 120 small panels, each one drawn with its own plant, laid out across a soft sage and ivory ground and framed by a quiet plain border instead of a busy one. The wool pile reads 3/8" deep, dense underfoot and still carrying the dry sheen that good Zagros fleece keeps for decades. At 9'10" x 12'7" it sits squarely in the 10x13 Persian rugs class, large enough to carry a full seating group or a 10 seat table with chairs pulled back. Condition is excellent, with intact selvages and original fringe visible along both ends, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, material and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a khesti, or panel garden, layout: 10 panels across by 12 down, each compartment outlined in dark brown and separated by narrow camel dividers that act like the irrigation channels of a walled garden. No two neighboring squares repeat. The rotation runs through a lobed boteh with a striated center, a flowering branch with hooked buds, paired wheat-like cypress forms, a honeycomb lattice with a rosette at one corner, a stepped arch with a scrolling finial, and a banded panel of small diamonds and dots. That disciplined, modular drawing is exactly what buyers of all-over Persian rugs look for, because the pattern reads evenly from every direction and furniture placed anywhere on it never cuts a medallion in half. The border is deliberately restrained, a single plain outer band with one fine brown guard line, which keeps all the attention on the garden panels.

The Sage, Ivory and Chocolate Palette

The panels alternate between a pale celadon sage and a warm ivory, with a third group in light camel, so the field shifts gently in blocks of tone rather than in one flat color. Natural abrash moves the sage from a cool pistachio at one end toward a warmer honey green at the other, most visible in the angled floor photograph. The drawing itself is chocolate brown, nearly black where the outlines are heaviest, with secondary motifs filled in taupe, mushroom and dove gray. The wide plain border picks up the lightest sage-ivory of the field and the fringe is a clean pale ivory. The overall effect is a neutral rug with a green cast, which is why it works where a red field would dominate; shoppers comparing green Persian rugs will find this one unusually soft and furniture-friendly.

Bakhtiar Weaving in the Chahar Mahal Villages

Bakhtiar rugs come from the villages of the Chahar Mahal district in the Zagros highlands of western Persia, south of Isfahan, where settled weavers from the Bakhtiari confederation work on upright village looms. The khesti garden panel is the design the region is known for above all others, and the best examples historically came out of the weaving towns around Shalamzar, where workshops drew the panels crisply and kept the dividers true over a field this long. The wool is the real advantage: highland sheep grazed at altitude give a fleece with high lanolin, which is why a Bakhtiar of this weight holds its pile under heavy traffic and takes a polish rather than going dull. Woven on a cotton foundation in the village manner, with a heavy handle and squared, honest proportions, this piece is a good deal more refined in its drawing than the average village production while keeping all of the structural toughness the name implies.