9'3" x 12'3" Persian Bakhtiari Rug | Garden Panel Khesti Design | Excellent Condition

This is a room size 9'3" x 12'3" hand-knotted wool rug in the garden panel layout that made Persian Bakhtiari rugs famous, with a dark maroon and rust red ground broken into a grid of small compartments, each one holding its own flowering scene. The handle is exactly what a good village piece should feel like: heavy, dense, with a full even pile sitting on a strong cotton foundation, and the back photograph shows a clean, regular knot line with the original ivory fringe intact. The 6th image, with the ruler laid across the end finish, is the quickest proof of what you are buying, a genuine hand-knotted weave rather than a printed or machine made copy. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials, size and weave of this exact piece.

Design and Motifs

The field is set out as a khesti, or garden panel, grid: roughly 6 compartments across and more than 10 deep, separated by narrow bands of small rosettes that meet in tiny 4 petal flowers at every intersection. No two neighbouring panels repeat. Some hold pairs of dark cypress trees on ivory grounds, some a weeping willow with pink blossoms, others a stylised vase of flowers, a large curling boteh paisley, an arched niche with a single spray, or an 8 petal rosette sitting on navy. That variety is the point of the design, which reads as an aerial plan of a walled Persian garden divided into irrigated beds. The main border runs a chain of palmettes and serrated leaves across a rust red ground, anchored by cream star rosettes at the 4 corners, and is framed by narrow navy and ivory guard stripes that keep the busy field contained.

A Dark Maroon Palette With Navy, Ivory and Teal

The dominant colour is a deep maroon that warms toward brick and terracotta where the light catches the pile, and it carries both the panel grounds and the main border. Against it the weaver set panels of true navy, almost black in the deepest passages, which give the grid its rhythm and its depth. Ivory does the lifting: a handful of cream panels scattered across the field pull the eye diagonally, and the same ivory outlines the trees, the vases and the border leaves so the drawing stays legible. Softer notes fill the rest, teal green in the cypress and willow foliage, a dusty rose pink in the blossoms and in one or two panel grounds, and small touches of pale gold and brown in the stems. The overall reading is warm and mellow rather than bright, the kind of palette that sits comfortably with walnut and oak floors, leather, and antique wood.

Bakhtiari Weaving in the Chahar Mahal Villages

Bakhtiari rugs come from the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, woven in settled villages such as Shalamzar, Saman and Boldaji by weavers tied to the Bakhtiari tribal confederation of the Zagros mountains. The wool from those high pastures is long stapled and oily, which is why a piece like this keeps a full, springy pile and resists crushing under furniture. Construction is village practice at its best: a cotton warp and weft, a heavy double weft beaten down hard between rows, and symmetrical knots tied with a thick yarn, so the rug has real weight and lies flat without slipping. The drawing is confident rather than delicate, closer in spirit to the Persian tribal rug tradition than to the fine city workshops, and that is precisely what gives a Bakhtiari garden panel its character and its long working life.