9'5" x 11'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Vintage Washed Gray Herati Medallion | 1970s Low Pile

This is a 1970s Tabriz that has aged into exactly the kind of quiet, chalky neutral decorators hunt for and rarely find in an original hand-knotted piece. The wool pile has worn down low and even over five decades of gentle use, leaving the drawing sharp and the surface almost flat, like a washed linen. At 9'5" x 11'2" it covers the same floor plan as most 9x12 Persian rugs, so it seats a full sofa group with all legs on. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction, and collectors who like to read the evidence themselves can compare the signs against our guide on how to date an oriental rug.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Tabriz mahi formula, drawn in a stepped rather than curvilinear line. A tall diamond medallion sits dead center, built up in small rectangular steps and finished at top and bottom with slim pendants and a crown of hooked finials. Four corner spandrels mirror the medallion in the same stepped outline, framing an open field that is filled edge to edge with the Herati, or fish, pattern: diamond lattices, paired lanceolate leaves curving around each rosette, and tiny 8 petal blossoms repeating at a very small scale. The main border carries alternating round rosettes and turtle palmettes on a meandering vine, flanked by narrow reciprocal guard stripes of leaf and bud. Because the palette is so restrained, the drawing itself does all the work, and the close detail shots show how cleanly the weaver held those small repeating figures across the full 11'2" length.

A Washed Gray, Beige and Brown Palette

The field reads as a warm oatmeal beige that shifts toward sand in the center and toward pale ivory near the borders, with faint horizontal abrash bands from the original dye lots. Over that ground the entire pattern is outlined in a cool charcoal brown, fine as pen work, while the medallion and spandrel frames are picked out in a soft dove gray that keeps the whole composition from going warm. Scattered through the Herati leaves are ghosted touches of pale celadon green and a light blue gray, visible in the macro shots, and the selvage is overcast in a faded rose pink that gives the edges a quiet lift. Nothing here is loud, which is why it works beside white walls, oak floors, brass and black metal. If a muted scheme is what you are building, this sits comfortably with our other gray and charcoal rugs.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the country's most commercially disciplined weaving city for centuries, the place that formalized the Raj system and trained the workshops that supplied the export trade through the 20th century. The mahi design on this piece is the house pattern of that tradition, and the weaving shows it: a firm cotton foundation, tight even knotting on the reverse, straight sides and squared corners across a 9'5" width, which is not easy to hold on a loom this wide. The wool is the tough, springy northwestern fleece that wears down rather than shedding out, and that is precisely why a rug worked this hard since the 1970s still holds its drawing. Anyone comparing weaves across the city group can see the range in our collection of Persian Tabriz rugs.