9'2" x 12'2" Persian Kerman Rug | Open Red Field with Ivory Floral Medallion | 1980's

Most Kerman weavings fill every inch. This one holds back, and that is why it works. A single ivory medallion sits in the middle of a deep red field that is left almost entirely open, with only loose sprays of blue and gold blossoms drifting toward the corners, and the whole composition is then framed by a wide ivory border packed with flowering vine. The piece measures 9'2" x 12'2", a true room size among 9x12 Persian rugs, and was hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation during the 1980's. The pile is still full and even end to end, the ivory selvages are clean and the original fringes are intact. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and handmade construction.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is a small pointed oval drawn in ivory, filled with a turquoise cartouche, rose rosettes and curling split leaves, and finished at each end with a short pendant of blue and cream buds. Around it, a loose wreath of flower heads and leaf sprigs marks the edge of the open field without ever closing it off. The 4 corners carry generous scalloped spandrels in the same ivory ground, their arabesque scrollwork answering the medallion at the center. Three borders complete the layout: a narrow outer guard of small blue rosettes on apricot, a wide main border of palmettes, five petal blossoms and sinuous vine, and an inner guard that steps around the spandrels in a continuous scalloped line. The drawing is entirely curvilinear, with the rounded stems and softly shaded leaves that separate workshop Kerman weaving from village work.

A Palette of Crimson, Ivory and Turquoise

The field is a saturated cherry crimson that leans toward burgundy in raking light, with the gentle tonal movement good wool always shows across a span this wide. Against it, the ivory of the medallion and spandrels warms into peach and apricot where the border ground begins, so the two halves of the palette meet without a hard line. The accents do the rest of the work: turquoise and deep cerulean in the flower heads, raspberry and rose pink at the centers of the rosettes, sage and olive green through the leaves and vine, and a dull gold that outlines the guard stripes. Brown outlining keeps every blossom legible against the red. Buyers shopping red and burgundy Persian rugs will find this one unusually easy to live with, because the open field reads as a solid color from a standing position and the detail only arrives up close.

Woven in Kerman, Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a center of fine weaving since the Safavid period, when its workshops produced the vase and garden designs that museums still hold today. The region's wool is long stapled and takes dye beautifully, which is exactly what an open red field demands: a weaker fleece would have gone blotchy over 12 feet. The back, visible in the fold photograph, shows straight knot rows and a tight, level weave on a cotton foundation, the mark of a drawn cartoon followed by trained hands rather than improvised village work. Depressed warps give the rug real body and weight, so it lies flat without curling and will take decades of traffic in a dining or living room. A 1980's Kerman in this condition, with full pile and uncut ends, is the kind of piece people keep rather than replace.