9'10" x 13'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Navy Blue Field with Teal Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a full room size Persian Tabriz in the classic city format: a deep navy blue field, a teal star medallion at dead center, ivory spandrels at the 4 corners and a wide rose red border carrying the whole thing. The wool pile stands at 3/8", short enough to hold the fine drawing of the vine work and heavy enough to sit flat and take traffic for decades. Photographed front, back and in close detail, it shows even pile height edge to edge, straight selvedges and clean white fringe on a cotton foundation. Among 10x14 Persian rugs this is the size that actually covers a large living room or seats a 10 chair dining table with the chairs pulled back. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is an 8 point star built in teal, ringed by curling split leaves and closed with a small red and ivory rosette at its heart, exactly as shown in the close-up photograph. From that center the field opens into a continuous scrolling vine that never repeats in an obvious block: palmettes, cusped rosettes and feathered leaves turn back on themselves in tight arabesques, with a pair of pendant cartouches running above and below the medallion on the long axis. The ivory spandrels cut in at the 4 corners and carry the same vine in reverse, ivory ground against navy, which gives the field its oval shape without any hard outline. The main border is a rose red ground filled with alternating palmettes and standing floral sprays, flanked by narrow teal guard stripes of small 4 petal flowerheads. It is a drawn, workshop design rather than a village one, and the corners resolve cleanly where the border turns.

The Navy, Rose Red and Teal Palette

The field is a dark indigo navy that reads almost aubergine where the light rakes across the pile, which is why the angled photographs look a shade warmer than the flat overhead shot. Against it the border is a true rose red, cooler and pinker than a brick or tomato red, and that contrast is what gives the rug its energy across a large floor. Teal does most of the quiet work: it fills the medallion, edges the guard stripes and turns up in small leaves scattered through the field, and it is the color that ties the navy to the red. Ivory appears in three places, the corner spandrels, the flowerhead guard stripes and the outlines of individual blossoms, and those ivory outlines are what keep the dense field legible instead of muddy. Soft apricot, gold and a dusty rose fill the smaller flowers. Buyers working with navy blue Persian rugs will find this one unusually easy to place because the red border reads as a frame rather than as the dominant color.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the city where cartoons were drawn, where the Raj system of counting knots across the width was standardized, and where the curved medallion format was refined into the template that half the rug world copied. Tabriz workshops weave on a cotton warp and weft with a firm, well packed weave, which is what allows a large 9'10" x 13'7" piece like this one to stay square and lie flat instead of buckling. You can see the discipline in the back photograph: tidy, regular knot rows, an even beat and no rippling along the ends. The wool is springy and takes dye deeply, so the navy stays dark and the reds stay saturated rather than washing out. Pieces of this scale were woven as main hall or salon rugs, and this one has come through in excellent condition with full, even pile throughout.