9'8" x 12'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | Red Field, Navy Medallion | Woven Signature Cartouche

This is a full room size hand-knotted Persian Tabriz rug measuring 9'8" x 12'6", woven in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands full and even edge to edge. It is the classic workshop formula of the city: a tomato red field, a single navy and ivory medallion on the center axis, sky blue corner spandrels, and a wide ivory main border, all drawn with the crisp outlining that separates a town workshop piece from village work. A small woven cartouche sits in the guard border at one end, which is how a Tabriz weaver or workshop marks a piece they were willing to put their name to. In a 10x13 footprint it covers a large living room or a 10 seat dining table with the furniture fully on the rug, and every rug ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The layout is medallion and corner, the drawing style Tabriz has built its reputation on for centuries. At the center sits an 8 point navy medallion with a salmon inner cartouche and a small sky blue rosette at its heart, ringed by gold palmettes and serrated leaves, then carried outward by an ivory halo filled with tiny cypress and flowering shrub motifs. Two navy pendants extend above and below on the long axis. The red field around it is not left open: it is packed with curling vine work, split palmettes, vase and flower groups, rows of small stepped shrubs, and a scattering of bird and animal figures worked into the four quadrants, all mirrored across both axes. The 4 corners carry sky blue spandrels filled with the same vocabulary of rosettes and leaves. The border system runs 7 bands deep, a broad ivory main border of alternating palmettes and leafy stems flanked by rose, navy and gold guard stripes, with the signature cartouche set into the rose band. The corners of the border turn cleanly, which is a cartoon and a weaver working carefully rather than improvising.

A Warm Red Field Framed in Ivory

The ground is a warm, slightly orange-leaning red, closer to tomato than to burgundy, and it reads bright and clean rather than dark. Against it the main border is a soft chalky ivory that lifts the whole rug and keeps the red from feeling heavy, while the corner spandrels are a distinctive powder sky blue that appears nowhere else at that scale and gives the field its sense of depth. The medallion works in true navy, almost inky, with a salmon and rose center. Through the field and border you will find olive and sage green in the leaves, a muted mustard gold in the palmettes, dusty rose and blush pink in the flower heads, small notes of teal and a dark brown-black used only for outlining. The overall effect is a multi-colored palette held together by three dominant tones: red, ivory and blue. On a pale oak or wide plank floor the ivory border does the framing; over a darker walnut floor the red field carries the room and the blues cool it down.

Tabriz: The Weaving City and the Quality of the Knot

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and is the oldest continuously working weaving city in the country, the place where the medallion and corner format was codified and then exported to every other workshop tradition. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches, and they work on a cotton warp with a hook-ended knife that lets them place knots tightly and quickly. The back of this rug, shown against a ruler in the photographs, is even and tightly packed with no slack rows, and the design elements stay sharp at small scale, which is what that density buys you: the tiny shrubs, the bird figures and the outlining all hold their shape instead of blurring. Combined with the tough highland wool of the region and a 3/8" pile, this is a rug built for a main traffic room. If you are shopping the format specifically, it belongs with our 10x13 Persian rugs, and the woven cartouche makes it a signed example rather than an anonymous one.