9'7" x 13'1" Persian Mahallat Rug | Soft Faded Red Floral Medallion | Semi-Antique Wool

This is a semi-antique room-size piece from Mahallat in central Persia, 9'7" x 13'1" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with the mellow, sun-softened red that only comes with decades of honest age. The pile is a full 3/8" and still even from selvage to selvage, the ends and sides are sound, and the drawing across the field has stayed crisp. It covers a standard 12x14 floor plan comfortably and sits squarely in the 10x13 Persian rug range that most living and dining rooms are built around. If you want to understand how a weave like this is placed in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity identifying origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is fully curvilinear rather than angular. A lobed navy medallion sits dead center, filled with an ivory cartouche and a small 8 petal rosette, and it throws a pointed pendant north and south along the long axis. Four blue spandrels close the corners of the field, each one drawn with the same serrated leaf and scrolling vine vocabulary, so the eye reads a large implied diamond across the whole floor of the rug. Between medallion and spandrels the red ground carries a dense, freely drawn vine system of palmettes, rosettes, cypress leaves and small blossoms, none of it mechanically repeated. The main border runs deep navy with alternating turtle palmettes and rosettes joined by a continuous vine, framed by a camel reciprocal minor stripe and a pair of narrow ivory guard bands at both edges.

A Soft Faded Red Field with Blue and Ivory

The field is a soft faded red, closer to warm brick than to fire engine, with gentle abrash that lightens in broad horizontal bands down the length of the rug. Against it, the spandrels and the inner reaches of the corner work read as a clear teal-leaning blue, several shades lighter and cooler than the navy of the medallion and the main border, which gives the design real depth instead of a flat two-tone effect. Ivory does the outlining work: it lights up the medallion center, the guard stripes and hundreds of individual petals, keeping the dense field legible from standing height. Camel and a soft olive green appear in the leaves and in the minor border, while small touches of salmon and a dusty rose warm the blossoms. Nothing here is loud, which is exactly why this palette sits well with white walls, dark wood and mixed antique furniture.

Mahallat Weaving in Central Persia

Mahallat is a town in the Markazi region of central Persia, in the same weaving belt as Arak and Sultanabad, and it is the town that gave the wider Mahal group its name. Weavers there work on a cotton warp and weft with local highland wool, which is springy, high in lanolin and takes vegetable dye with the quiet depth you see across this field. The knot count is village workshop level rather than city atelier level, and that is the point: a slightly larger knot and a generous 3/8" pile give you a rug that takes real traffic for generations instead of a fragile display piece. The back photo shows the weave clearly, tight and regular, with straight rows and a foundation that has kept the rug flat and square. Decades of use have already done the hard work of mellowing the reds, and the pile still has plenty of life left in it.