9'9" x 12'10" Persian Sarough Rug | Red-Orange Field, Blue Borders | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

This is a full room-size Persian Sarough at 9'9" x 12'10", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands up straight across the whole field. It is the classic Sarough statement piece: a deep red-orange ground carrying a densely drawn floral network, a lobed ivory and navy medallion at center, and a wide navy main border framed by two sky blue bands. The weave is even from end to end, the selvages are intact, and the pile shows no bald areas or open low spots, which is why the condition reads excellent. It sits naturally under a 10 seat dining table or floats a large seating group, and if size is the deciding factor you can see how it compares with our other 10x13 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with its certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is traditional Sarough through and through. A lobed medallion sits dead center, built from an 8 petal ivory rosette inside layered navy and pale blue cartouche work, with slender pendants reaching out along the long axis. Around it the field is not left open: it is filled edge to edge with curling vine, serrated lancet leaves, palmettes and small rosettes in ivory, dark beige and blue, all repeating in mirrored halves so the eye keeps finding the same flower on the other side of the medallion. The 4 corners carry large spandrels in soft blue, each one worked with its own vine and cream blossoms, and they give the crowded field a place to breathe. The main navy border runs a turtle palmette and rose meander, and the two flanking sky blue bands and the narrow beige guard stripes step the pattern down cleanly to the red-orange outer edge.

A Red-Orange Field Against Blue Borders

The dominant color is a warm red-orange, closer to a ripe brick or madder tone than to a cool burgundy, and the wool takes light well enough that the field shifts a shade lighter or deeper depending on which way you walk around it. Against that ground the blues do all the contrast work: a medium sky blue in the spandrels and the inner and outer border bands, and a much darker indigo navy in the main border and in the outlines of the medallion. Dark beige and clean ivory run through the vine work as the third color, picking out petal edges and leaf tips so the pattern stays legible at floor distance. Small hits of pale green, soft peach and pure white appear inside individual blossoms, and there is a faint abrash through the upper field where the dye lot changed, a normal and desirable sign of hand-dyed wool. The palette is warm enough to carry a room with wood floors and cream walls, while the blue borders keep it from reading as an all-red rug.

Sarough Weaving and Quality

Sarough weaving comes out of the villages around Arak in west central Persia, an area that has produced heavy, tightly packed floral rugs for well over a century and built its American reputation on exactly that: a rug you can put in the busiest room in the house and not worry about. Our guide to Persian Sarough rugs goes deeper into the regional history and how to read the weave. On this piece the back photograph shows a fine, regular knot line with the pattern coming through crisply on the reverse, cotton warps lying flat and straight, and no puckering or roping along the sides, all marks of a workshop that kept proper tension on a loom this wide. The 3/8" pile is a working pile height, dense enough to feel substantial underfoot and short enough to hold the detail in the vine work. Combined with the tough local wool, that construction is what allows a Sarough of this age to still present in excellent condition.