9'10" x 16' Persian Kerman Rug | Light Blue Open Field with Ivory Medallion | 1960s

This is a genuine 1960s Persian Kerman at 9'10" x 16', hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and large enough to cover a full formal room end to end. The palette is unusual for the town and unusually easy to live with: a wide, quiet light blue field, an ivory and pale gold medallion at center, and a deep ivory border drawn with hundreds of small roses. At close to 160 square feet it belongs in the family of oversize Persian rugs that almost never come up in soft colors, and the pile is still a full 3/8" with no repairs and no thin spots. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and size.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kerman formula of a single pointed oval medallion set on a wide open field, with anchor pendants reaching toward each end. The medallion itself is packed with tiny naturalistic roses, buds and leafy vine, and it carries a small green cartouche at its very center that you only notice up close. Instead of filling the field, the weaver left it almost entirely bare, which is what gives this piece its calm. The work returns at the 4 corners, where scrolling floral spandrels in peach and ivory arc inward and soften the edges of the blue. The main border is the busiest part of the rug: a deep ivory ground carrying an unbroken procession of rosettes, palmettes and small blossoms, framed on both sides by narrow green and blue guard stripes with a fine floral meander. The back photo shows tight, even knot rows and a clean, well-kept end finish.

A Light Blue Field with Ivory, Peach and Green

The field reads as a soft aqua light blue, cooler and greener than a sky blue and considerably deeper in person than the studio photo suggests. Because the pile is long and the field is open, the color shifts as you walk around it, silvering where the nap lays away from you and going a clearer teal-blue where it lays toward you. Against that field, the medallion and spandrels sit in warm ivory drifting to pale gold and old parchment, with the flower heads picked out in a faded peach and salmon pink. Small navy blue dots anchor the centers of the rosettes and give the border its rhythm, and a moss green runs through the guard stripes and through the leaves of the vine work. The main border ground is a creamier ivory than the medallion, with green showing through in patches at the outer edge. The result is a pastel rug with real structure: soft enough for a light room, but never washed out.

Kerman: Weaving from Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a workshop town for centuries, known above all for floral drawing and for pictorial garden borders that no other weaving center attempts with the same confidence. The wool of the region is long-stapled and takes soft dye beautifully, which is exactly why Kerman is the origin that produced the great pastel room-size pieces of the mid twentieth century rather than the dark reds and navies of the northwest. Weaving here is done on a cotton foundation with a symmetrical knot and a designer's cartoon, so the curves stay true across a 16 foot length and the two ends of the medallion match. A rug of this width takes several weavers seated at one loom working the same row, and the fact that the field holds a single even tone across almost 10 feet of width is a sign of well-sorted yarn and careful dyeing. Pieces from the 1960s like this one are now firmly in semi-antique territory and are getting hard to find in a size this large with the pile intact.