9'7" x 16' Persian Isfahan Rug | Red Field, Navy Floral Borders | Vintage Wool & Silk Pile

This is a genuinely long room rug, 9'7" x 16', woven in the Isfahan tradition of central Persia on a cotton foundation with a wool and silk pile clipped to about 1/4 inch. The drawing is the classic formal Isfahan formula, a single rosette medallion floating in a dense field of curling vine, worked here at a scale that very few older pieces reach. Silk sits in the rosette petals, the vine outlines and the small flower heads, so the pattern catches the light at a different angle than the wool around it. The pile is preowned and shows honest, even use rather than repair, which is exactly what buyers of large vintage floor pieces look for. Among oversize Persian rugs this length is a practical find for a long living room or a formal dining table with chairs pulled fully back. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity describing origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true all over floral, a continuous system of thin curling vines that loop back on themselves and carry palmettes, serrated leaves and small multi petal blossoms across every inch of the red ground. At the center sits an 8 petal rosette medallion set on a dark ground, each petal filled with its own flower head and outlined in fine red tracery, with a small concentric star at the very middle. Four spandrels answer the medallion in the corners of the inner field, drawn in ivory vine on the same dark ground so the layout reads clearly even in a long room. The main border is wide and formal, with alternating palmettes and rosettes linked by an unbroken vine, flanked on both sides by narrow guard stripes of meandering flower heads and an ivory outer stripe. The corners of the border turn cleanly, which is a drawing test that separates workshop weaving from village copying.

The Red Field, the Near Black Border and the Ivory Drawing

The field is a warm tomato red that softens toward brick in raking light, and it is a live color rather than a flat one, with gentle tonal movement across the width. Against it the main border is a deep indigo navy so dark it reads as black from standing height, which is the black called out in the specification. The drawing in between is carried almost entirely by ivory and cream, with a second family of soft salmon pink and pale peach inside the medallion petals and the larger border palmettes. Cooler blue grey appears in the leaves and in the small paired birds and flower centers scattered through the field, and there are occasional touches of olive green and a darker wine red for outlines. The silk content shows up as a slight sheen on the palest ivory and pink passages, so the medallion appears to lift off the red ground as you walk around it. Anyone building a room around red and burgundy rugs will find this palette warm without being loud.

Isfahan Weaving in Central Persia

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving center since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. The reputation of Isfahan rugs rests on drawing rather than on color alone, the curved line, the flowing vine and the precision of a repeat that never quite repeats, and that kind of drawing only survives at a high knot count on a tightly spun cotton foundation. Najafabad, just west of the city, weaves in the same design language at a slightly heavier handle, which is how large formal floor sizes like this one came to exist at all, since the city workshops concentrated on smaller show pieces. The back photograph shows a fine, regular knot and a straight selvage, with the pattern legible from the reverse, a sign the weaver kept tension even across a 16 foot warp. That structural discipline is why a preowned piece of this age still lies flat and still holds its drawing after decades of use.