9'8" x 12'8" Persian Heriz Rug | Geometric Medallion | Semi-Antique 1980s Wool

This is the kind of Heriz that gets bought once and kept for 40 years. Woven in the 1980s on a cotton foundation with a hard, lustrous wool pile, it measures 9'8" x 12'8" and reads as one continuous geometric statement across the floor: a rustic red field, a stepped ivory medallion on the center line, and a deep navy border holding the whole thing together. The pile is even from end to end, the selvages are sound, and the ivory fringe is original, so it needs nothing before it goes down. It ships with a certificate of authenticity and sits squarely in the most useful of all proportions, which is why buyers searching 10x13 Persian rugs keep coming back to Heriz first.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is pure northwest Persian village work: everything is built from straight lines, right angles and stepped outlines rather than curves. At the center sits an eight lobed ivory medallion with a cross-form indigo core and a small dark square at its heart, flanked by 4 stepped salmon and ivory cartouches filled with serrated leaf combs. Long pendant palmettes run off the medallion top and bottom, and the 4 corners carry big ivory spandrels drawn with the same hooked vine and serrated leaf vocabulary. The field between them is packed with small angular blossoms, hooked vines and rosettes, so the rug never looks empty from any angle. Collectors of geometric Persian rugs will recognize the border treatment too: a navy main band of alternating ivory hexagonal cartouches and open rosette medallions, framed by a red reciprocal inner guard and a rare camel gold outer guard stripe that gives the outside edge a warm glow.

A Palette of Rustic Red, Indigo, Olive and Ivory

The ground is a rustic red that shifts between brick and soft terracotta as the light moves, with gentle abrash banding across the width that tells you the wool was dyed in small lots. Against it, the border indigo goes almost black in the shade and opens into true navy in direct light. The ivory is a warm, slightly creamy wool rather than a bleached white, which keeps the medallion and spandrels from looking harsh. Olive green appears in small quantities inside the border cartouches and among the field blossoms, a color that is always a good sign in a Heriz because it was one of the harder dyes to hold. Rounding it out are pale sky blue outlines, salmon pink in the subsidiary cartouches, and camel gold in the outer stripe and a few scattered rosettes. Red, navy and ivory do most of the work, so the rug settles easily over wood floors and against brown, tan, green or cream upholstery.

Heriz: The Villages East of Tabriz

Heriz is a cluster of weaving villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, and its reputation comes down to two things: water and wool. The mineral-rich local water sets the dyes, and the highland sheep grow a coarse, high-lanolin fleece that wears like rope instead of crushing flat. Village looms there work from memory and squared paper rather than a fine city cartoon, which is exactly why the medallion is stepped instead of round and why the pile is heavy and thick in the hand. That combination makes a Heriz the standard recommendation for a busy room: it takes traffic, furniture legs and decades of vacuuming without thinning. If you want to understand the structural clues behind the 1980s dating on a piece like this, our guide to how to date an oriental rug walks through the wear, dye and weave evidence we read on the back.