9'10" x 13'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Rust Floral Medallion | 1980s Fine Wool

A 1980s workshop Tabriz in a true room size, this 9'10" x 13'7" piece is hand-knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation and has come through roughly 40 years with full, even pile and its original ivory fringe intact. The drawing is the formal Tabriz formula: a dark star medallion floating on a rust field of curling vine, framed by maroon spandrels and a deep navy border. It is a rug that settles a large living room or a long dining room without shouting, and at this footprint it sits squarely in the most searched bracket of 10x14 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship, this one included, travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a 16 point star medallion drawn in near-black aubergine, filled with small rosettes and leaf sprays and anchored by an ivory inner cartouche with an 8 petal rosette and a navy dot at the exact middle. Slender pendant palmettes run off the medallion toward each end, pointing the eye up and down the 13'7" length. Around it the field is a disciplined all-over vine system: thin ivory arabesque stems loop in repeating circles, carrying lotus heads, serrated leaves, split palmettes and small teal shield blossoms that read almost like scattered tiles across the rust ground. A scalloped ivory outline traces the medallion zone and separates it from maroon corner spandrels, each spandrel packed with its own flowering vine and cloudband leaves. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a navy main border of alternating round rosettes and lobed palmettes, flanked by ivory floral guard stripes and a soft sage green outer stripe, all 4 corners resolved cleanly without the motif being chopped.

A Rust Field Cooled by Navy and Teal

Rust carries the rug. It is a warm terracotta that leans salmon where the light runs with the pile and deepens toward brick where it runs against it, and the wool has enough luster that the field shifts gently as you walk the room, which is why this piece belongs with the rust Persian rugs. Against that ground the palette is deliberately cool: dark indigo blue in the main border and the medallion ground, soft teal and turquoise in the shield blossoms and medallion tracery, and a clear ivory used for the vine lines so the drawing stays legible rather than muddy. Maroon fills the spandrels and the inner border stripe, bridging the rust and the navy, while beige and sand tones appear in the palmette shading and the outer guard stripe. Small flashes of ochre, rose pink, deep green and cream turn up in individual flower heads, the kind of 20 color working palette a Tabriz cartoon asks for. The overall effect is warm and formal at once, easy beside wood floors, antique brass and both cream and navy upholstery.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's workshop city for centuries, the place where a designer draws a scaled cartoon and a team of weavers follows it knot by knot. That system is what makes a rug like this possible: the curved vine, the symmetrical star and the matched spandrels all depend on a paper design and a Tabriz hook knife rather than memory, and Tabriz measures the resulting fineness in Raj, knots counted across the width. This piece is a solid mid-weight workshop weave, firm in the hand with a tight, legible back and a crisp wool selvedge, built for daily use rather than for a wall. The 1980s dating is consistent with the cotton warp, the synthetic-free clarity of the indigo and the full pile; if you want to understand how weavers, dealers and collectors read those clues, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same evidence we used here.