9'6" x 12'6" Persian Mashad Rug | Burgundy Field & Navy Floral Medallion | 1980s Wool

Woven in the 1980s in the workshops of northeastern Persia, this 9'6" x 12'6" piece is the classic city statement: a burgundy field packed edge to edge with floral tracery, a navy star medallion holding the center, and matching navy spandrels closing all 4 corners. The wool is springy and slightly lustrous, the pile stands full and even across the whole 150 inch length, and after 4 decades there are no repairs, no wear tracks and no color loss to report. Anyone shopping Persian Mashad rugs knows this is the format they are built around, and among 10x13 Persian rugs it is the proportion that actually covers a full seating group or a dining table with chairs pulled out. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, age, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 point star medallion drawn in near black navy, outlined in a fine ivory contour line that makes the whole figure lift off the red ground. Inside it sits a tiered ivory and camel rosette ringed by small rose and blue blossoms, a medallion within a medallion that rewards a close look. Pendants extend north and south, each one a lobed navy cartouche filled with a salmon palmette, and the same vocabulary repeats at reduced scale in the 4 corner spandrels. Across the open field runs a continuous system of curling vines, serrated leaves, rounded palmettes and small 8 petal rosettes, drawn in the curvilinear manner of workshop weaving rather than village geometry, with the two halves mirrored so the eye keeps finding matched pairs. The border is a 3 band arrangement: a wide navy main band carrying alternating palmettes and rosettes, flanked on both sides by ivory guard stripes with a running wave and vine scroll, then a narrow red selvage edge, with ivory fringe finishing both ends.

Color: Deep Burgundy, Near Black Navy and Ivory

The field is a deep burgundy that shifts toward raspberry where the light hits the pile and settles into a wine tone in the shade, the kind of natural abrash that only hand-dyed wool produces. Against it, the medallion, the spandrels and the main border are worked in a navy so dark it reads black until you look straight down into the wool, at which point the blue comes through clearly. Ivory does the structural work here: it outlines the medallion, fills the guard bands and picks out individual petals so nothing muddies. The secondary palette is wider than most burgundy and red Persian rugs of this type: rose pink, salmon, soft sky blue, olive and moss green, camel, and small stabs of rust orange in the leaf tips. That green and pale blue keep the rug from reading as one flat mass of red, and they give a decorator real freedom with upholstery.

Mashad and the Weaving of Khorasan

Mashad is the capital of Khorasan in northeastern Persia, a pilgrimage city whose workshops have supplied large formal room sizes for well over a century. Khorasan fleece is long stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why Mashad reds glow rather than sit dull, and why the pile keeps a soft hand under foot even in a heavy weave. This piece is built the way a city workshop builds: a cotton foundation for dimensional stability at nearly 13 feet of length, wool pile knotted at a steady, medium density, straight selvages and squared ends, all of which you can read on the reverse in the back photograph. It is a room size woven to be walked on for generations, and the excellent condition after 4 decades is the proof of that construction rather than a claim about it.