9'8" x 12'10" Persian Mashad Rug | Berry Red Field, Navy Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a room-size Mashad from northeast Persia, 9'8" x 12'10", hand-knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a full, even pile from edge to edge. The drawing is the classic city formula of Khorasan: a single lobed medallion with pendants floating on a berry red ground, deep navy spandrels at the 4 corners, and a wide navy main border carrying palmettes and rosettes between ivory guard stripes. At this scale it reads as one of the more usable 10x13 Persian rugs we carry, large enough to hold a full seating group or a 10 seat table without the pattern feeling crowded. If you want the background on the weaving city itself, our guide to Persian Mashad rugs covers it in detail. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is a tall lobed cartouche in navy, outlined in teal and ivory, with a small rosette at its core and anchor pendants reaching toward each end of the field. Around it the ground is filled with detached flowering sprays, curling serrated leaves, carnations, blossoming rose heads and the slim crescent leaf that Khorasan weavers use to fill open ground. Nothing is stiff: the vines curve, the leaf tips hook, and no two sprays repeat exactly, which is how you read a drawn cartoon rather than a copied grid. The navy spandrels in the 4 corners carry their own arabesque scrollwork and lantern shaped cartouches, so the berry field is framed twice before you reach the border. The main border runs a steady alternation of large palmettes and open rosettes joined by a thin vine, with narrow ivory guard borders on both sides stepping down in scale, and a plain berry outer band finishing the edge.

A Berry Red Field Against Navy, Ivory and Teal

The field colour is berry, a cool raspberry red that sits further toward crimson than the brick tones of village weaving, and the wool takes light well enough that the ground shifts a shade lighter where the pile leans away from you. Against it the medallion, spandrels and main border are an almost black navy, which gives the design its contrast and keeps the red from going flat. Inside that navy the palette opens up: teal and soft sky blue in the leaves and rosette centers, ivory and cream in the guard stripes and flower heads, warm gold and apricot in the smaller blossoms, touches of soft green in the foliage, and a clear rose pink picking out petal tips. Close up, as in the corner and field photographs, you can see how much of the detail is worked in light blue over dark ground, a Mashad habit that makes the border legible from across a room. The overall effect is a deep, saturated, traditional red rug with enough blue and ivory in it to pair with cool wall colours as easily as warm ones.

Mashad, Khorasan, and the Weave

Mashad is the great city of Khorasan in northeast Persia, a pilgrimage center whose workshops have supplied large, formal, curvilinear carpets for well over a century. Khorasan wool is the reason these rugs age the way they do: long stapled, lustrous, and heavy enough to carry a full pile under decades of traffic. This piece is woven in the city manner, a cotton warp and weft with a dense, carefully clipped wool pile, and the back photograph shows tight, regular rows with clean colour separation and a straight selvage, which is what you want to see on a 13 foot carpet where any sloppiness in tension shows up as a crooked border. The sides are original and the fringe is clean white cotton. Pile depth is full and even across the whole surface with no low spots, no repairs and no reweaving, which is unusual on a rug of this size and the main reason we priced it where we did.