9'9" x 13'3" Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Orange Field with Navy Medallion | Excellent Condition

This 9'9" x 13'3" Persian Sarouk is the kind of piece that anchors a whole room without asking for attention: a warm red orange field, a deep navy star medallion at center, and a wide light blue border that cools the whole composition down. The pile is a full 3/8" of hand-spun wool knotted onto a cotton foundation, heavy and tight in the hand, exactly what the weavers of the Sarouk district are known for. Condition is excellent, with even pile from end to end, straight sides and clean original fringe, as the corner and back photos show. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and the proportions put it right in the middle of the most practical of all formats, the 10x13 Persian rugs that sit under a full seating group or a 10 seat dining table.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Sarouk formula and then fills it in generously. A navy star medallion sits dead center, built from interlocking arabesque scrolls around a small ivory cartouche with an 8 petal rosette at its heart, and it reads clearly even from across a large room. The field around it is not left open: it carries an allover lattice of curling vine, serrated leaves, palmettes and standing floral sprays, punctuated at regular intervals by ivory and cream rosette bouquets that act as quiet resting points for the eye. The 4 corners carry light blue spandrels filled with the same vine and palmette vocabulary, so the corners echo the medallion rather than competing with it. The main border is a broad light blue band of scrolling navy arabesque and floral heads, framed on both sides by narrow ivory and navy guard stripes and a fine barber pole minor border, with a plain red outer band and a reciprocal zigzag finishing the edge. Detail photo 4 shows how carefully the small floral elements in the minor borders are articulated, a sign of a weaver working with a proper cartoon rather than from memory.

Color Palette in Detail

The field is a warm red orange, a tomato to brick tone with real depth rather than a flat dye, and it shifts subtly as you walk around the rug because the hand-spun wool takes dye unevenly in the way good wool should. Against that sits the navy blue of the medallion, close to indigo and dark enough in places to read almost black, which gives the center its weight. Between those 2 poles the weaver worked in a full range of blues: the main border and spandrels are a mid sky blue, the arabesques inside the medallion step down into a soft denim and a teal, and tiny accents of pale blue pick out single flower heads throughout the field. Ivory and cream do the structural work, outlining the medallion, carrying the guard stripes and forming the rosette clusters, while small touches of salmon, olive green, caramel gold and rose appear inside individual blossoms. The overall effect is a confident traditional palette that reads as a true red rug from a distance and as a multicolored one up close, and it belongs comfortably alongside other red and burgundy Persian rugs with a blue second color.

Sarouk Origin and Weaving Quality

Sarouk is a village in central Persia, north of Arak in the Markazi region, and it gave its name to one of the most dependable weaving traditions in the country. The looms there work to a workshop standard: a cotton foundation, a dense, tightly beaten knot, and a medium pile left just long enough to take decades of traffic, which is why so many Sarouks from the last century are still in service in American houses today. The local wool is the other half of the story, springy and high in lanolin, so the pile keeps its sheen instead of going dull. On this piece the back photograph shows tidy, regular rows and a compact weave, and the pile stands up evenly across all 13'3" of length with no thinning at the center or along the ends. If you want the background on how these rugs are built and how to read quality in one, our guide to Persian Sarouk rugs covers the district, the weave and the design families in detail.