9'6" x 12'9" Modern Persian Rug | Turquoise Green Roundel Design | Vintage 1970s Low Pile

This 9'6" x 12'9" rug was hand-knotted in Persia in the 1970s and it does not look like anything the period is usually remembered for. There is no medallion, no spandrel, no border at all: just a turquoise green ground carrying a disciplined grid of segmented roundels in rust, apricot, sage and grey, running straight off all 4 edges. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, now low and smooth from decades of honest floor life, which is exactly what gives the surface its soft, chalky light. It sits comfortably alongside the best modern and contemporary hand-knotted rugs while being genuinely old, hand-dyed and one of one. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and age.

Design and Motifs

The whole composition rests on one repeated element: a circle divided into 8 pie-shaped wedges radiating from a small solid turquoise hub, each roundel outlined in a fine dark brown line that the weaver drew by hand. The circles are set in staggered rows across the field, close enough to read as a textile pattern rather than scattered ornament, and because no 2 roundels use the same sequence of colors the eye keeps moving. This is a true all-over design, with the pattern cropped mid-motif at the edges so the rug feels like a cut piece of a larger field. There is no border and no cartouche, only a narrow blue-grey flatwoven selvage along the sides and short ivory fringe at both ends. The drawing has slight irregularities, circles a touch oval, a wedge line that wanders, and those are the fingerprints of a loom, not a printer.

The Color: Turquoise Green With Rust and Apricot

The ground is a turquoise green that leans teal in the detail shots and sea glass pale in the overhead view, with gentle abrash banding across the width where the dye lot shifted on the loom. Against it the wedges work through a warm, dusty palette: rust and brick, burnt orange, soft apricot and clay pink, a pale sage green, a mushroom grey that cools the whole thing down, and occasional strokes of ivory. Each roundel center returns to the same turquoise as the field, which stitches the pattern back together and keeps a busy repeat from feeling noisy. The result is a rug that behaves like a high-end decorator piece: it reads as a calm block of color from the doorway and only reveals its rust and grey detail up close, which is why it works so well in rooms built on white walls, pale upholstery and walnut wood. If you are building a room around cool tones, it belongs in the same conversation as the best green Persian and Oriental rugs we carry.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Persia produced a small quantity of deliberately modern work in the 1970s, woven on the same looms and with the same wool as traditional city and village rugs but drawn to a contemporary cartoon, and this is one of those pieces. The wool is hand-spun and takes dye unevenly in the way that makes vintage color worth paying for, and the cotton foundation visible on the reverse is even and tightly beaten, with straight knot rows and no bulges or waves. A pattern this geometric is unforgiving: any slip in the knot count would show as a lopsided circle, so the regularity of the roundels across nearly 13 feet of length tells you the weaver kept count. If you want to understand what gives a piece like this its date, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same evidence we used. At this scale it covers a full seating group or a large dining table, and sits in the heart of our 10x13 Persian rugs selection.