9'7" x 13'5" Persian Rug | Red Field, Green & Gold Medallion | 1980s Hand-Knotted Wool

This is a full room-size Persian rug from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a thick, even 3/8" pile across all 129 square feet. The drawing is classic traditional Persian: a scalloped red field dense with flowering vine, a green and navy starburst medallion at the center, and deep gold spandrels in the 4 corners planted with blossoming trees. At 9 feet 7 inches by 13 feet 5 inches it sits in the most useful large format there is, which is why we group it with our 10x13 Persian rugs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a medallion-and-corner composition drawn with a lot of movement. At the heart sits a round medallion ringed in navy, with a green inner field and a small 8 petal rosette at the dead center, flanked by paired leaf and vine scrolls. Radiating out from it are large shield-shaped palmettes in cream and rose, each one filled with its own miniature flower head. The red field behind them is never left empty: curling vines, serrated leaves, multi-petal rosettes, small paisley forms and tiny blossom sprays cover it edge to edge, and the whole field is closed off by a scalloped cartouche outline that separates it from the gold corners. Those spandrels carry a different idea altogether, with slender flowering trees and branches heavy with round red blossoms rising out of leafy clusters. The main border repeats broad pink, green and cream palmettes on a dark ground, bracketed by narrow green guard stripes studded with orange and white rosettes, and the corners resolve cleanly, which tells you the weaver followed the cartoon carefully rather than improvising to fit.

A Palette of Red, Purple Blue, Green and Gold

The field is a true raspberry red with a cool, slightly blue cast rather than a brick or rust tone, and it holds its saturation evenly from one end to the other. Framing it is the border color named in the specs as purple blue: a deep indigo navy with a distinct violet lean where the light hits it, visible most clearly in the close-up of the corner. Between field and border sit the two strongest supporting colors. The spandrels are a warm antique gold, closer to dry wheat than to yellow, and the guard stripes and medallion interior run to a cool bottle green and emerald that cuts the red cleanly. Inside the florals the weaver worked a long list of secondary shades: ivory, salmon pink, old rose, olive, caramel brown, sky blue, teal, aubergine and small hits of orange, all of them used in small quantities so the rug reads as a busy, lively surface rather than a loud one. If red is the color you are shopping for, this piece belongs with the best of our red Persian rugs.

Persian Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was woven in Persia in the 1980s in the mainstream workshop tradition: a cotton warp and weft for dimensional stability over a 13 foot length, hand-spun wool pile, and a curvilinear floral cartoon of the kind a town atelier would follow knot by knot rather than a tribal weaver working from memory. The back photograph shows what you want to see in a piece of this age, with tight rows, clean color definition from the reverse, and no sign of repair or reweave. The pile still stands at a full 3/8 inch with no low areas, no exposed foundation and no moth damage, so the rug has decades of use left in it. Wool of this grade actually improves with traffic as the lanolin is worked back to the surface and the colors soften. For anyone trying to place a weave within a decade, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug explains the clues we use, from the dyes and the wool to the handle of the back.