9'10" x 13'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Rustic Coral Floral Medallion | Semi-Antique Wool Pile

A room-size Tabriz in the old workshop idiom, drawn from a cartoon and woven with the loom discipline that made the town famous. At 9'10" x 13'2" it sits squarely in the 10x13 Persian rug class, the size that covers a full living room or seats a 10 chair dining table with the chairs pulled back and still on wool. The wool carries the mellowed, faintly honeyed cast of a semi-antique piece, the pile is even at 3/8" across the whole field, the selvedges are tight and the ends are secure with the original ivory fringe intact. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, the materials and the hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic curvilinear medallion and corner scheme. At the center sits a layered 8 petal rosette on a teal green core, ringed by a lobed star medallion in ivory and gold, then a wide halo of open beige that lifts the whole middle of the rug away from the coral ground. Radiating out of that halo are serrated palmettes, split arabesque leaves and hooked cloudband forms, all connected by a continuous vinescroll that never quite repeats. The 4 corners carry large ivory and navy spandrels filled with the same palmette vocabulary, drawn to scale rather than simply shrunk. The field between medallion and border is a dense all-over garden of rosettes, tulip heads, buds and thin curling tendrils, with small navy blossoms used as punctuation. Three bands frame it: a narrow teal vine guard, a broad navy main border of alternating palmettes and mirrored S scrolls, and an outer coral edge that ties back to the field.

The Color Story: Rustic Coral, Navy and Green

The ground is a rustic coral, a warm brick tone with orange in it rather than the cool oxblood of a Sarough, and it has softened with age into something close to terracotta under natural light. Against it the drawing is carried mostly in beige and buttery gold, two values apart, which is why the vinery stays legible across 13 feet instead of turning to noise. Navy blue does the structural work: it holds the main border, outlines the spandrels and drops small dark accents into the field so the eye has anchors. The greens are the surprise, a muted teal to sage that appears in the medallion core, the inner guard stripe and the leafwork, and that green is what keeps a coral and navy rug from reading as purely warm. Gold highlights sit at the medallion center and in the border palmettes. In practice this palette is forgiving, working with walnut and mahogany, with cream or greige walls, and with the deep blues and greens people are painting rooms today.

Tabriz: The Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia, in East Azerbaijan, and has been the commercial and technical capital of Persian weaving for centuries. Its workshops measure fineness by Raj, the number of knots per gereh of about 2.75 in across the width, and they weave from a paper cartoon with a hook-handled tool, which is why Tabriz borders run straight, medallions close correctly at the axis and a 13 foot rug comes off the loom square. The back of this piece, shown against the ruler, is a crisp and regular grid on a cotton foundation with clearly defined knot rows and no slack, the signature of a shop weave rather than village work. The pile is good Azerbaijani wool, springy and slightly lustrous, which is what allows a rug of this age to still stand at a full 3/8" with no low spots through the traffic lanes.