9'8" x 12'5" Persian Kerman Rug | Open Red Field | Navy & Ivory Floral Medallion

This is a room-size Persian Kerman built around restraint rather than clutter. The whole 9'8" x 12'5" floor is given over to a single plain crimson field, shaped into a long cusped cartouche, with one navy and ivory medallion floating at its center and everything else pushed out to the surrounding panels and border. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, the pile is even and full across the field, and the cotton warps on the back read clean and straight. Pieces like this were drawn for formal rooms where the furniture does the talking and the rug supplies the color. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction, and it sits comfortably among 9x12 Persian and Oriental rugs for a standard dining or living room footprint.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is the set piece: a navy ground filled edge to edge with ivory and camel arabesque vinework, finished with scrolled shoulders, a pointed finial at top and bottom, and small pendant tips reaching out to left and right. Inside it sits a pale blue oval holding a single rose and crimson rosette, the only spot of soft pink in the middle of the rug. That medallion is outlined in a camel band and set against the plain red cartouche, whose edges step and curl in a long ogival shape framed by a scrolling ivory vine. Beyond the field, the four quadrants carry sky blue panels packed with dense small-scale floral tracery and ivory lobed cartouches, each one holding its own miniature bouquet. The main border runs a chain of arched niches filled with vases, palmettes and flowering sprays in navy, rose and ivory, with a camel scroll band inside and out. Photo 7 shows the reverse, where the Greek-key style scrollwork of the border reads just as crisply from the back as it does from the pile side.

A Crimson Field Against Sky Blue and Navy

The field is a deep true crimson, warm rather than orange, and because it is left plain it behaves almost like a painted surface, shifting in tone as the light moves across the wool. Against it the medallion lands as a hard dark navy, lit from within by ivory and soft camel scrolls. The outer quadrants go the other way entirely into a light sky blue, which lifts the whole design and keeps a rug this large from feeling heavy. Threaded through those panels are rose pink, raspberry, soft green and ivory blossoms, small enough that they read as texture from standing height and only resolve into individual flowers up close. Camel and sand tones carry the framing bands, and the ends finish with a plain red kilim and natural ivory fringe. If a saturated red floor is what you are after, this piece anchors a room the way the best red and burgundy Persian rugs do, with blue doing the cooling work.

Kerman Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a weaving center for centuries, known for curvilinear drawing, pictorial and garden borders, and a palette that reaches into pastels no other Persian town handles as confidently. Kerman weavers work from a full cartoon and use the vase-and-niche border as a signature, which is exactly what runs around this rug. The technical mark of a good Kerman is control over an open field: with no pattern to hide behind, every row of knots has to stay even or the surface will show it, and a weaver who can hold a plain crimson ground over nearly 12 feet is working at a serious level. The wool here is soft and takes dye deeply, the drawing of the medallion curves cleanly without the stair-stepping you see in village work, and the back shows a tight, regular knot structure throughout.