9'10" x 12'9" Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Floral Field with Navy Scalloped Surround | Hand-Knotted Wool

This is a full room size piece, 9'10" x 12'9", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and built the way traditional Persian Sarouk rugs have always been built: a heavy, closely packed pile that sits flat and takes furniture without complaint. The tomato red field is drawn with an open, airy floral repeat rather than a crowded one, so the rug reads calm from across the room and detailed up close. The pile is even from end to end, the selvedges are intact and the ivory fringe is clean and original, which is why it is graded Excellent. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted in Persia, and pieces in the 10x13 Persian rug range like this one are the size most American dining and living rooms are actually built for.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic curvilinear composition. At the center sits a small ivory and rose medallion, drawn as a soft flowering rosette, set inside a navy cartouche with scrolling ivory leaf work and a pendant at each end. Around it the red field carries loose sprays of blossoms, buds and flowering branches, each one shaded individually rather than repeated by rote, so the pattern breathes. What gives this rug its personality is the surround: instead of a straight inner border, the navy ground pushes into the field in a deep scalloped, cloud-band outline with 4 corners resolving into large ivory and navy spandrels. The wide navy main border is packed with palmettes, serrated leaves and rosettes on curling vine, framed by a sage green guard stripe and a narrow red outer band. The corner detail photograph shows how tightly the weaver kept the drawing at the turn, where the vine meets the corner cleanly instead of being cut short.

Color Palette

The field is a warm tomato red that leans slightly coral in daylight and deepens to brick under lamplight, a living ground color with the faint natural variation you only get from wool dyed in small lots. Against it the border and medallion run true navy blue, almost black at a glance, which is what makes the red look as saturated as it does. The floral work is carried in ivory and cream, with a great deal of powder and cornflower light blue in the blossoms, rose pink in the petals and medallion center, soft gold and buff in the leaf tips, and a muted sage green that appears in the guard stripe and in scattered leaves. Small touches of dark brown outline the larger flower heads and keep every motif legible. It is a red rug, clearly, but the blue content is high enough that it sits comfortably with navy, denim, cream, walnut and antique brass.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Sarouk weaving comes out of the villages around Arak in central Persia, a region that has supplied the American market with room size floral rugs for more than a century and did it well enough that Sarouk became a household word here. The weave is a heavy, tight one on a cotton warp and weft, with the wefts beaten down hard so the rug has real weight and body, and the wool clipped at a medium pile that wears slowly and polishes with foot traffic. You can see the workmanship on the back: straight, regular rows, no bulges, and a finish at both ends that has held. This is the kind of Persian rug bought to be used, put under a dining table or across the main seating area, and handed on 30 years later still doing the job.