9'3" x 13'4" Persian Mashad Rug | Plum Field, Navy Floral Borders | 1980s, Excellent Condition

A room-size Mashad from the 1980s, woven in Khorasan on a cotton foundation with a full wool pile that still stands up straight across the whole 9'3" x 13'4" surface. Handled in person, two things stand out: the plum ground has that slightly cool, wine-leaning tone that only Khorasan wool takes, and the drawing stays tight and legible right into the corners, which is where cheaper workshop weaving usually gets lazy. The pile is even, the selvages are intact, the fringe is clean and original, and there is no repair or reweave anywhere on the piece. It ships with our certificate of authenticity recording origin, age, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center carries a lobed navy medallion built around an ivory core and a small 8 petal rosette, with layered cusps that step outward like a flower opening. Pendant palmettes drop from the top and bottom of the medallion along the vertical axis, and 4 navy corner spandrels close the field with matching ivory vine work. Between medallion and spandrels the plum ground is filled with a classic Mashad all-over vine: curling split-leaf arabesques, lotus blossoms, serrated acanthus leaves and small 8 point stars, each flower drawn with its own outline rather than copied flat across the field. The frame is a wide navy main border of alternating palmette cartouches and paisley-like boteh forms, set between two ivory guard bands of bud-and-vine, with a fine dark reciprocal stripe running inside and out. It is a formal, balanced drawing that reads as one composition from across a large room.

Color Palette

The field is plum: a cool wine red with a raspberry lift where the light catches the pile, shading gently from one end to the other in the soft abrash that comes from hand-dyed yarn. Against it the borders and medallion ground are a deep inky navy, dark enough to look almost black in shadow and clearly blue up close. Inside that framework the weaver worked a broad accent palette, sky and cobalt blue in the leaves and blossoms, teal and pine green in the vine, rose pink, soft peach and brick rust in the flower heads, camel and old gold in the leaf fillings, and undyed ivory in the medallion core, the guard bands and the outlines that separate one motif from the next. That ivory outlining is what keeps a crowded field readable. For buyers shopping specifically for plum and burgundy Persian rugs, this is the warm, jewel-toned end of that family rather than a bright tomato red.

Mashad Origin and Weaving Quality

Mashad sits in Khorasan, in the northeast corner of Persia, and its weaving tradition grew up around the city's pilgrimage workshops. Local Khorasan wool is long-stapled and unusually lustrous, which is why Persian Mashad rugs hold their sheen for decades and why the plum and navy dyes here still look saturated rather than dusty. This piece is city workshop weaving, not village work: cotton warps and wefts, a curved medallion-and-vine cartoon that requires a drawn design to follow, and consistent knot density from one end of more than 13 feet to the other, with the back showing a clear, regular grid and no hurried patches. The pile was left at a medium height, which is how Mashad weavers get that soft underfoot feel while still letting the fine ivory outlines hold their shape. Nearly 40 years on, the wool has broken in and gained a quiet gloss, the kind of surface a new rug cannot fake.