9'9" x 12'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | All-Over Floral Shah Abbasi Design | Red & Ivory Wool, Excellent Condition

This 9'9" x 12'3" Persian Tabriz fills a full room without leaving a gap of bare floor at the walls. The field is a deep red, drawn edge to edge with a symmetrical floral repeat rather than a central medallion, and the whole composition is held inside a wide ivory main border with matching guard stripes. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands upright and even across all 4 corners, and the condition is excellent. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials and hand-knotted construction, so what you read here is documented with the piece.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a classic all-over floral Persian rug layout: broad Shah Abbasi palmettes, curling saz leaves and open rosettes strung along a thin red vine that mirrors itself left to right and top to bottom. Look at the 4 large lobed palmettes set at the midpoints of the field, each one shaded from apricot into navy, and at the fan-shaped crowned flowers on the long axis that give the eye a place to rest where a medallion would normally sit. Long feathered leaves sweep diagonally into the corners, and small blossoms fill the gaps so there is no dead ground anywhere in the field. The ivory main border runs an alternating rhythm of palmettes and turned leaves on a continuous meander, and the narrow guard stripes carry a fine flowerhead chain that keeps the outer edge crisp against the red.

A Deep Red Field Framed in Ivory

The ground is a warm brick red with a slight tomato cast in direct light, and it reads darker and more claret in the corners where the pile lies away from the camera. Against it, the palette is wider than a photograph first suggests: ivory and cream in the flowerheads and the border ground, ink navy in the palmette centers, a clear teal and a paler sky blue in the leaves, sage and olive green in the vinery, soft gold and apricot in the smaller blossoms, with occasional touches of rose and pale straw. The ivory border is a true cream rather than a bright white, which softens the transition from field to floor and lets the rug sit comfortably with oak, walnut or pale stone. The overall effect is rich but not heavy, because the light ivory frame carries nearly 2 feet of breathing room around the red.

Tabriz: The Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most commercially serious weaving city for centuries, working to the Raj system where the count is taken across the width of the rug. Its workshops are the ones that kept the curvilinear court style alive, which is exactly what you are looking at here: the vine does not break into angles at the turns, the palmettes are drawn round, and the border repeat lands cleanly at each corner, all of which take a tight knot and a disciplined cartoon to achieve. The cotton foundation gives the rug a flat, stable lie, and the tough local wool is what lets a piece this size take traffic for decades and still show an even pile. As a large room-size Persian rug, it is built for the rooms people actually live in, not for a display wall.