9'10" x 13' Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Field, Navy Floral Border | Hand-Knotted Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a room-size Persian rug in the classic floral idiom, hand-knotted entirely by hand on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that still stands up full and even across all 118" of width. The field is a deep raspberry red carrying a layered central medallion, pale blue corner spandrels and a wide navy main border, and the whole drawing is curvilinear rather than geometric, which is exactly what buyers look for in Persian Sarouk rugs. At 9'10" x 13' it sits squarely in the most useful large format we sell, so it belongs with our other 10x13 Persian rugs. Condition is excellent, with clean selvages, intact cotton fringe at both ends and no repairs visible in the photographs. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity confirming it is a genuine hand-knotted Persian piece.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an ivory rosette set inside a navy star-lobed medallion, which is then wreathed by a ring of boteh and palmette forms so that the medallion reads as a flower opening outward in 8 directions. Above and below it, two pendant cartouches drop into the field, each drawn with the same scrolling arabesque vocabulary. The pale blue corner spandrels are the strongest feature of the composition: large scrolling vine arms that curl inward with bold cloud-band hooks and small ivory palmettes caught inside them, giving the rug 4 corners that frame the red field rather than crowd it. Between the medallion and the spandrels the ground is filled with small detached blossom sprays, serrated leaves and pairs of birds. The navy main border runs an alternating sequence of large rosettes and 6 petal blossoms linked by a thin vine, flanked on both sides by camel-tone guard stripes carrying a tiny reciprocal zigzag and a running floral meander, a finishing touch you can see clearly in the border close-up.

A Color Palette Built on Deep Red and Navy Blue

The dominant note is a saturated raspberry red that carries a faint cool undertone, the kind of ground that makes a room feel finished without going brown or orange, and it places this piece naturally among red and burgundy Persian rugs. Against it the main border is a near black indigo navy, which gives the perimeter real weight and keeps the red from spreading. The third color, and the one that makes the rug distinctive, is a soft sky to cerulean blue used for the spandrels and for parts of the medallion halo, a lighter and friendlier blue than the border. Those three are then articulated with ivory and cream in the medallion rosette and the spandrel palmettes, salmon and rose pink in the border blossoms, a warm camel tan in the guard stripes, and small touches of mustard gold, olive green and dark aubergine in the individual flower heads. The wool has taken the dyes with a visible sheen, and the pile shifts tone slightly as you walk around the rug.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of central Persia, and its name became one of the most trusted in the trade because of two things: unusually tough, springy local wool and a weaving habit of packing the knots tight enough to hold a curved line. Sarouk weavers work on a cotton warp and weft with an asymmetric knot, and the density of the beat-down is why rugs from this group stay flat, keep their shape in a large format and are still in service generations after they left the loom. The drawing here is workshop-quality rather than village improvisation: the medallion is centered, the spandrels match corner to corner, and the border turns the corner cleanly instead of being cut off, all signs that the weaver followed a proper cartoon. The back photograph shows the knot structure plainly, with even rows and no slack. For a 9'10" x 13' rug that has to anchor a living room or seat a dining table on wool, that combination of fine drawing and heavy construction is the whole point of buying a Sarouk.