9'4" x 12'4" Vintage Persian Tabriz Rug | All Over Mahal Floral Design | Excellent Condition

A vintage room size Tabriz woven in the old Mahal manner, with no central medallion and a continuous garden of blossoms running from one end of the 12'4" length to the other. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, dense underfoot and still full across the whole field, and the wool has taken on the quiet sheen that only comes from decades of honest age rather than from a wash. At 9'4" x 12'4" it sits squarely in the most useful of all proportions, the one most buyers are hunting for when they search 9x12 Persian rugs, and it will float a full sofa group or a 10 seat table without crowding the walls. Condition is excellent, with even pile, straight sides and intact ends. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true all over floral design, built on a thin vine scroll that loops across the red ground and carries large rounded palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, serrated curled leaves and small spade shaped buds. Pairs of long curled leaves cradle a pink blossom at regular intervals down the center, and the drawing is deliberately generous and slightly drifting rather than mirror precise, which is exactly what collectors like about Mahal design rugs. Because there is no medallion, the pattern reads the same from every seat in the room and tolerates furniture placed anywhere on it. The field is closed by a narrow olive brown band of small reciprocal cartouches, then the wide ivory main border, where big red split palmettes alternate with blue rosette clusters and tendrils that turn back on themselves at all 4 corners. A sage green guard stripe set with small red and ivory flowerheads runs outside that, finished by a fine dark meander and a red selvedge.

A Closer Look at the Colors

The ground is a rose red that leans raspberry in strong light and settles into a deeper cherry tone on the floor, with gentle horizontal variation through the field where the dye lots changed on the loom, the natural abrash that distinguishes vegetable dyed wool from machine color. Against that red the ornament is worked almost entirely in soft neutrals: sage and olive green on the big leaves, ecru and oatmeal on the palmette outlines, salmon pink and dusty rose in the blossom hearts, with small hits of teal blue and charcoal brown used as outlines to hold each motif apart. The main border swings the balance the other way, an ivory to warm cream ground carrying clear red palmettes, powder blue rosettes and deep green accents, so the eye gets a bright frame around a saturated center. That combination makes it one of the easier red Persian rugs to live with, since the cream border lifts the red off dark hardwood instead of letting it sink into it.

Tabriz Weaving and the Mahal Tradition

Tabriz, in the northwest corner of Persia, has been the country's most commercially sophisticated weaving center for centuries, and its workshops have always been willing to weave in the idiom a market asked for. The Mahal drawing seen here belongs to the central Persian village tradition around Sultanabad, and Tabriz looms reproduced it with tighter, more disciplined knotting than the originals, which is why the vine scroll stays clean and the palmettes keep their shape at this scale. The back shot shows the structure plainly: a cotton warp and weft, even rows with no slack or buckling, and the sort of flat, regular handle that makes a rug lie dead straight in a large room. The wool is the heavy, lanolin rich northwest Persian clip, a pile that compresses and recovers rather than crushing, and after decades it still measures a full 3/8" across the whole 9'4" width. This is the kind of weaving that was bought once for a formal room and then simply never needed replacing.