9'8" x 17'3" Persian Kerman Rug | Sage Green Open Field | Oval Medallion Oversize

This is a true room-filling Kerman: 9'8" x 17'3" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with an unusually quiet sage green field and a single oval medallion set slightly above center. The pile is a plush 3/8", cut deep enough to hold light the way the flat photograph shows, and the weave is fine and even across the full 17'3" length. Most rugs this long come to us in heavy geometric village designs, so a soft-palette Kerman at this scale is a genuinely uncommon find among oversize Persian rugs. Condition is great, the fringes and selvages are intact, and every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming its origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kerman open-field formula. A wide oval medallion sits at the heart of the rug, its interior filled with a tight diamond lattice carrying a small rosette in every compartment, ringed by a banded frame and then by a scalloped collar of palmettes and curling leaves. Slender pendant finials drop from the top and bottom of the oval into the empty field, and matching quarter spandrels anchor the 4 corners. The border does the heavy lifting: a broad camel main band packed with a continuous run of palmettes, boteh-like blossoms and stepped comb motifs, flanked by narrow guard stripes of small repeating florets. Small square cartouche panels break the corners of the inner frame, each holding its own rosette cluster. Because the field itself is left almost entirely open, the eye reads the medallion and the border as two separate compositions, which is exactly why this design suits very long rooms where furniture will cover parts of the floor.

A Sage Green Field with Camel and Rose Detailing

The field is a soft sage green, closer to celadon than to a saturated forest tone, and it shifts noticeably with the nap: silvery and almost mint where the pile lies away from you, deeper and cooler where it lies toward you. Against that, the border reads as warm camel and light tan, shading into a dusty apricot along the outer reaches. The detail work is where the color really lives. Every floret in the border and every compartment of the medallion lattice carries rose pink, a clear sky blue, an olive to seafoam green and small ivory highlights, with occasional deep indigo outlines and tiny raspberry accents that only show up close. A narrow sage guard stripe runs between the border and the outer edge, tying the two halves of the palette together. It is a pastel, daylight-friendly scheme that sits comfortably with pale walls, warm woods, brass and both cool and warm upholstery.

Kerman: Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a city of professional workshop weavers for centuries. Its reputation rests on curvilinear drawing and a painterly sense of color: Kerman weavers were dyeing and blending soft rose, celadon, camel and sky blue long before those tones became fashionable in the West, and the city's designers worked from full cartoons rather than from memory, which is why the medallion here is a true oval with clean symmetry rather than a drawn-by-eye lozenge. The asymmetric Persian knot on a cotton warp and weft gives the rug a supple handle and a straight, stable rectangle even at 17'3" long, which is not easy to hold on the loom. Turn the corner over and the back shows a fine, regular knot grid with the pattern legible line for line, the mark of workshop weaving rather than village work. Among Persian Kerman rugs, pieces at this width and length in a pale palette are the hardest to source.