9'9" x 12'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Rose Field with Navy Starburst Medallion | 1980s Wool

This is a full room size piece from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a dense, even 3/8" pile with no thin areas and clean, straight sides. The rose field is unusual for a Persian workshop rug of this scale, and it is what makes the piece work in rooms where a red or navy ground would feel heavy. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this one sits in the softest end of the colour range while keeping the formal drawing collectors expect. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a large multi-lobed starburst medallion, its points radiating out over the rose ground in tiers of navy, teal and soft green, with a buttery ivory rosette at the very core surrounded by a ring of pale petals. Above and below the medallion sit crown-shaped pendants worked in the same palette, and the 4 corners carry deep cusped spandrels in teal blue, each filled with a dense spray of small flowering vines and leaf forms that read almost like a garden panel. The open field between them is never empty: curling vine scroll, rosette clusters, palmettes and slender serrated leaves drift across the rose ground in balanced mirrored repeats. A wide navy main border carries an undulating vine with pink and cocoa rosettes, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes of small blue and rose blossoms, so the design steps cleanly from field to edge in 5 distinct bands.

Color

The field reads as a warm rose, closer to salmon and coral than to a true red, with gentle abrash shifting between a deeper rose near the medallion and a lighter blush toward the corners, exactly the sort of variation you get from natural dye lots rather than a printed surface. Against that ground the blues do the heavy lifting: an inky navy in the medallion core and main border, a brighter peacock teal in the spandrels and leaf work, and a pale sky blue in the smaller blossoms. Ivory and buttery gold outline the medallion and run through the inner border, keeping the whole composition bright, while soft sage green appears in the leaves and hot pink accents flicker through the border flowers. The result is a genuinely multi-coloured rug that still holds a single clear tone from across the room.

Origin and Weave

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most organised weaving city for centuries, working from drawn cartoons on the loom rather than from memory, which is why its curvilinear medallions come out this symmetrical at 12'9" long. The back shows a tight, regular knot laid over a cotton warp and weft, with crisp definition in the small floral detail and firm, well-finished selvedges. Highland wool from the region takes dye well and wears slowly, and this example has clearly been looked after: the pile is full, the colours are unfaded and the ends are intact. If you want to understand how a piece like this is placed in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used to put it in the 1980s.