9'6" x 16'1" Persian Tabriz Rug | Cream Garden Panel Design | 1980s Weave

This 9'6" x 16'1" Persian Tabriz was woven in the 1980s as a garden panel piece, the compartment layout Tabriz weavers call khesti, and it is one of the more usable oversize Persian rugs we carry because the drawing is small in scale rather than one large medallion. The field divides into 24 framed panels across 4 columns and 6 rows, each one holding its own small garden. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, the handle is firm and flat, and the rug lies straight and square with clean, even selvages. Condition is excellent, with full pile from edge to edge and no repairs. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The garden panel design treats the field as a walled garden seen from above, each of the 24 compartments outlined by a narrow pearl and rosette stripe in navy and ivory. Inside the panels the drawing changes from square to square: flowering vases with symmetrical sprays, slender blossoming trees, cypress silhouettes, and several compartments shaped as pointed arches that echo a prayer niche. A few panels carry small birds among the branches. Nothing repeats mechanically, so the field reads as a sequence of individual pictures rather than a stamped grid. The main border is the feature that ties it together, an arcade of pointed arches alternating rust, pale blue and ivory, each arch filled with its own flowering plant, framed inside and out by narrow guard stripes of running vine and small rosettes. It is a classic Tabriz workshop composition and it holds attention across a run of 16 feet, where a single medallion at this length can leave long empty stretches.

The Cream Palette, Color by Color

Cream is the governing color, both as the ground of most panels and as the lattice of framing stripes that runs between them, which is why the rug reads light and open from across a room. Against that cream the weaver set warm accents: orange and rust in the arch panels and in the border arcade, softening to peach in the flower heads and to beige and light camel in the panel grounds. Navy blue does the structural work, drawing the panel outlines and the fine inner guard stripes, with brown running through the outer bands. Light blue appears as whole panel grounds in a scattered rhythm, cooling the warm columns beside them. Green shows in the leaves, stems and cypress forms, red in small blossom centers, and pink in the finest floral detail, visible mostly when you are standing over the rug. The overall effect is a soft, sunlit multi-color field rather than a high-contrast one, and it sits comfortably with ivory walls, walnut and oak floors, and both traditional and transitional furniture.

Tabriz Weaving and Workshop Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been a design capital of the Persian rug world for centuries, with an established workshop system, professional designers and a weaving vocabulary of its own. Tabriz fineness is counted in Raj, knots per gereh of roughly 2.75 inches across the width, and the discipline of that system shows here in the straight panel frames, the even repeat of the border arcade and the way the 4 columns hold true over the full 16'1" length. The rug is worked on a cotton foundation with a firm, low 3/8" wool pile, the combination Tabriz uses for pieces meant to be lived on: dense enough to resist crushing under furniture, low enough that the fine panel drawing stays legible. Woven in the 1980s and kept in excellent condition, the wool has had time to settle into the gentle sheen that new production does not have yet, while the pile depth and the crisp edge finishes show a rug that has seen very little floor traffic.