9'4" x 11'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | Raspberry Red All Over Floral Design | 1980s

This is a cheerful, confident room size Tabriz from the 1980's, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still in excellent condition after four decades. Instead of the usual single medallion, the weaver filled the whole field with a flowing all over design of palmettes, rosettes and leafy vines on a raspberry red ground, framed by a deep navy floral border. At 9'4" x 11'3" it covers the same footprint as most 9x12 Persian rugs while sitting a few inches shorter, which suits a living room seating group or a dining table with chairs pulled out. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is organised on a mirrored vertical axis rather than around one center. Running down the middle are three dark 8 petal rosettes and a brilliant turquoise and gold rosette at the heart of the rug, each hung from thin vine stems that branch out into large cream and camel palmettes, split leaves and lotus heads. Between them the weaver scattered tiny flower sprays, buds and serrated leaves so there is almost no open ground, which is what gives the rug its busy, decorative movement. The 4 corners carry curling scroll cartouches in pale blue and ivory that echo the drawing in the border. The main navy border alternates a tall palmette with paired rose blossoms and curving green leaves, while a narrow ivory guard stripe filled with small repeating rosettes and boxes separates border from field on all sides, closed by a fine blue-green outer stripe and ivory fringe.

The Color Palette: Raspberry Red, Navy and Green

The field colour is the first thing you notice: a saturated raspberry red with a rose cast, brighter and happier than the brick reds usually seen in red and burgundy Persian rugs, with gentle abrash shifting the tone slightly from one end to the other as the wool takes the light. Against it the border reads as a deep inky navy, almost black in the corners, which anchors the whole piece. The drawing is where the rest of the palette lives: bottle green and teal in the leaves and rosette centers, pale ice blue in the corner scrolls, soft shell pink and blush in the large palmettes, ivory and cream in the guard stripe and flower heads, warm camel and tobacco brown through the vinework, and small hits of gold and mustard at the rosette cores. The pile has the dry lustre good Persian wool develops with age, so the colours look lived in rather than new.

Tabriz: The Weaving Capital of Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for centuries, the city where the Raj system of counting knots across the width of the rug is still the standard measure of fineness. Tabriz workshops are known for disciplined curvilinear drawing: the vines here close cleanly, the palmettes are symmetrical across the axis, and the border repeat stays true around all 4 sides, which is workshop training rather than village improvisation. The construction is classic Tabriz, a tight wool pile knotted on a cotton foundation that keeps a rug this size flat and stable on the floor, and the even, firm handle explains the excellent condition of a piece from the 1980's. If you want to understand how weave, wool and dye behaviour place a rug in a decade, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same signals we used here.