9'10" x 13'2" Persian Isfahan Rug | Ivory All Over Floral Field | 1970s Estate Piece

This is a room size Persian Isfahan rug from the 1970s, woven in wool on a cotton foundation and kept in a private American home until it came to us. At 9'10" x 13'2" it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat table, which puts it squarely in the most useful of all 10x13 Persian rugs. The pile is even from end to end, the ivory field has aged into a warm parchment tone rather than a flat white, and the selvedges and fringe are intact. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity that records origin, materials and size.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the weaver ran a balanced all over floral design across the whole field, built on a lattice of thin indigo vines that meet at small 8 petal rosettes. Serrated red palmettes and deep blue flowerheads anchor the repeat, while clusters of peach and camel blossoms, tulips and curling saz leaves fill the ground between them. The drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with vine tips that finish in a clean hook rather than a blunt stop, and the repeat is mirrored so the pattern reads correctly from either end of the room. Three borders frame the field: a narrow red vine band, a navy band of alternating palmettes and cypress like sprays, and a wide soft beige main border carrying large rotating floral cartouches picked out in red, green and light blue.

The Ivory, Red and Indigo Palette

The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached wool and light cream than to bright white, and it carries the light well in a large room. Against it the weaver worked two strong accents: a clear tomato red in the palmettes and the inner guard stripe, and a deep indigo navy in the larger rosettes and vine work. Between those two poles sits a full range of softer tones, light sky blue in the flower centers, peach and salmon in the small blossoms, camel and tan in the leafwork, with occasional touches of green and a soft rose in the border cartouches. The wide main border shifts to a pale beige that reads almost pink under warm light, which keeps the frame from competing with the field. Dark outlines around each motif hold the whole palette together and give the pattern its crispness at floor level.

Isfahan and the Safavid Weaving Tradition

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a court weaving center since the 16th century, when the Safavid workshops set the standard for the curved line, the flowing vine and the precisely drawn palmette. That reputation rests on drawing rather than on decoration, and drawing of this kind only holds together at a tight knot count on a cotton foundation, which is exactly how this piece is built. The wool is dense and slightly lustrous, packed down hard enough that the back shows a clear, regular grid, and the corners resolve cleanly where the borders turn. Pieces of this generation, woven for domestic use and then kept in one household for decades, are the sweet spot for a buyer who wants genuine Isfahan drawing at a room size that actually fits a modern floor plan.