9'8" x 12'4" Persian Heriz Rug | Geometric Stepped Medallion | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

This is a semi-antique Persian Heriz at the size most American rooms actually need: 9'8" x 12'4", wide enough to carry a full seating group or a 10 seat table with the chairs pulled back. It is 100% hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, with a short 3/8" pile that has worn down evenly and now feels dense and tight underfoot rather than thin. The palette has mellowed the way good madder red does with decades of light, from a saturated brick into a softer rose brick that reads calm and almost neutral in a room, while the navy and black drawing stays crisp. Condition is excellent, with even pile, intact ends and straight selvedges, and the rug ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is textbook Heriz and entirely built from straight lines, which is what separates village work from the curved city cartoons. At the center sits an 8 petal rosette on a pale salmon ground, framed by a scalloped ivory outline and then by a large stepped diamond medallion with long spear pendants reaching toward each end. Four heavy stepped corner brackets fill the spandrels in ivory and pale gold, each one packed with angular vinescrolls, hooked leaves and small stylized vases, and the field between them carries clipped serrated leaf forms, small rosettes and a pair of cypress-like uprights along the vertical axis. The wide navy main border runs a rhythm of alternating palmettes and eight point star rosettes joined by a chunky vine, held by a narrow ivory guard stripe inside and a green-cream meandering vine on the outer edge. Buyers who want more of this angular vocabulary can browse our geometric Persian rugs for comparison.

Color: Faded Brick Red with Navy, Black and Ivory

The field is a faded brick red that shifts between terracotta and a dusty rose depending on where you stand, with subtle abrash bands where the weavers moved from one dye lot to the next. Against that sits deep navy blue in the medallion outline, the corner brackets and the main border, cut with true black accents in the leaf forms and pendant tips, so the pattern stays legible even from across a large room. The spandrels and the diamond frame are drawn in soft white and warm beige, with patches of pale gold and butter cream inside the corner cartouches that lift the whole composition. Secondary notes include earthy brown, a smoky slate blue in the smaller vines, and occasional pinpricks of light blue-green and salmon pink. The back and fringe photo shows how clean the color is at the knot base, and how the reds stay warm rather than orange.

Origin and Weave: The Heriz Villages of Northwest Persia

Heriz is a group of weaving villages east of Tabriz, sitting below Mount Sabalan in northwest Persia. The local water is mineral rich and the sheep there grow famously tough, high lanolin wool, which is why Heriz rugs are the pieces dealers recommend for households that get real traffic. Weavers work from memory and from village conventions rather than a fine cartoon, giving the angular medallion, stepped corners and straight line borders seen here. Heriz village pieces sit comfortably under 200 knots per square inch by tradition, and that is a feature rather than a shortcoming: the thicker knot and short clipped pile are what make the rug hard wearing across generations. In this scale it slots naturally beside our other 9x12 room size Persian rugs, and if you want to understand the signs that place a piece in the semi-antique bracket, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same details we read on the back of this one.