9'9" x 13'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field with Teal Cartouches and Rose Medallion | 1980s

This is a 1980s Tabriz in the colorful, garden-minded style the city's workshops were weaving for export at the time, and it has survived in excellent order with a full, even wool pile. The field is ivory, the drawing is dense, and the palette runs through sea green, deep red, navy and warm brown in a way that reads far more lively than the usual red-and-blue formula. At 9'9" x 13'7" it sits squarely in the practical 10 x 14 class, so it will carry a full seating group or a long dining table without the furniture crowding the border. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording its origin, materials and measurements. If you are cross-shopping, it is worth browsing our other 10 x 14 Persian rugs to see how much variation exists inside one size.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed medallion built in layers: a red core scattered with rose blossoms, a green ring, then a salmon surround edged with feathered, fern-like leaves that spray outward like a firework. Matching pendants run off the medallion at top and bottom, each one anchored by a small red vase with paired roses. The ivory ground around it is not left quiet. Teal cloud-form cartouches float across it, filled with fine scrolling vine and tiny star rosettes, and between them the weaver worked navy palmettes, curling arabesques and slender leaves. Four small stepped panels, two above the medallion and two below, carry pictorial vignettes of grazing deer in pink and gold, a quiet detail most buyers only notice on the second look. The corner spandrels drop in large serrated leaves of dark green and brown. The main border is brown and carries alternating heart-shaped palmettes and ivory panels populated with birds and running animals, flanked by narrow guard stripes of red rosettes and blue tulip forms.

A Palette of Ivory, Sea Green and Rose Red

The base note is a soft ivory that leans cream to light gold under daylight, and it does the important work of keeping a very busy drawing legible. Over it sits the color that makes this rug unusual: a cool sea green, close to teal, used in broad cartouche shapes and again deeper and darker in the corner leaves. Red appears in two registers, a clear rose red in the medallion and pendants and a warmer brick tone in the border rosettes. Navy blue fills the vine work and the outlines, giving the pattern its structure at a distance. Warm brown frames the whole piece and reappears in the field vines, tying border to center. Salmon, apricot and soft pink run through the medallion petals and the little animal panels, and small touches of gold and ivory light the individual flower heads. Set against a pale floor the greens dominate; on dark wood the ivory lifts and the red medallion becomes the focus.

Tabriz, the Workshop City of Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, working from drawn cartoons rather than memory, which is why the curved lines here close cleanly and the four corners resolve the same way. Weavers there measure fineness in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches, and a rug of this scale and detail requires a loom crew working to a set plan for many months. The hand is firm, the cotton foundation is straight, and the wool has the slight sheen that Tabriz wool keeps when the pile has never been walked hard. A 1980s piece like this one belongs to the last strong commercial period before prices and labor changed the trade, and pieces in this condition, with full pile and unfaded green, are getting harder to source.