9'8" x 14'4" Persian Sarouk Rug | Antique All-Over Floral Design | Plum Field, Navy Border

This is a classic antique Persian Sarouk rug in the format collectors look for: a deep plum field scattered with detached floral sprays, a heavy navy main border, and the dense, slightly stiff handle that only comes from a tightly packed wool pile on a cotton foundation. At 9'8" x 14'4" it covers a full formal room without being cut off by furniture, which is exactly how the 1920s and 1930s weavers of the Arak valley intended these pieces to be used, and it sits squarely in the most useful of all 10x14 Persian rugs. The pile still has good height, the selvages and ends are sound, and the back reads clean and even from corner to corner. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn in the detached spray style that defines the Sarouk look: individual flowering stems, rosettes and small blossom clusters floating free on open ground rather than locked into a continuous lattice. Down the lower half of the field, paired flowering trees rise from thin stems and flank a group of 3 large boteh, the center one broadest, each one filled with its own miniature bouquet. Above them the sprays thin out and climb toward a row of small shield forms at the top of the field, a nice piece of drawing that gives the composition a clear top and bottom. The main border carries alternating palmettes and cartouche-shaped boteh separated by curling serrated leaves, framed inside narrow reciprocal guard stripes and an outer gold band of running vine. The border corners are resolved cleanly, without the awkward truncation you often see on village work of this scale.

Plum, Navy, Ivory and Olive in the Palette

Plum is the anchor, a saturated raspberry-red ground with a faint natural variation that moves in soft horizontal bands across the width, the signature of hand-dyed wool worked in small batches. Against it the main border reads almost black-navy, which throws the floral drawing forward and gives the whole rug its weight. The drawing itself is where the rest of the palette lives: warm ivory and pale gold in the guard stripes and the outer vine band, olive and soft gold-green in the leaves and stems, and a light sky blue used repeatedly in the leaf tips and blossom centers, which keeps a red and navy rug from ever feeling heavy. Small hits of rust-orange and deep aubergine appear inside the boteh and rosettes. The overall effect is rich but not dark, and the plum field is flexible enough to sit with walnut, cherry and dark oak furniture as easily as with a modern ivory sofa.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village north of Arak in central Persia, and the name covers the surrounding weaving district that produced some of the most heavily built room-size rugs in the country. The weave is a tight Persian knot on a cotton warp and weft, beaten down hard and left with a fairly thick pile, which is why a Sarouk of this size has real physical presence and why so many of them are still in service a century later. The wool from this region is long-stapled and takes dye deeply, giving the plum field its depth rather than a flat surface color. The back of this piece, visible in the folded corner, shows even knotting, straight rows and no repairs or reweaves. Among Persian Sarouk rugs in oversize dimensions, a piece with intact pile, original ends and honest color like this one is getting harder to find each year.