9'9" x 13' Persian Tabriz Rug | Raspberry Red Field, Ivory Medallion | 1980s Wool Weave

This is a full room piece: 9'9" x 13' of hand-knotted wool pile on a cotton foundation, woven in Tabriz in the 1980's and still carrying a deep, unworn nap across the whole field. It sits in the most useful of the large formats, which is why buyers searching 10x13 Persian rugs keep coming back to Tabriz work: the drawing is formal enough for a dining room and the wool is tough enough for daily traffic under a sofa. What sets this one apart is the color, a raspberry red ground that is far more saturated than the usual brick or rust Tabriz field, set against teal green corners. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and knotting.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered lobed medallion built in 3 stages: an 8 petal rosette in saffron orange and teal at the core, an ivory cartouche ring drawn with small palmettes and serrated leaves, and an outer violet blue lobed frame filled with its own blossom scrolls, finished with a stepped pendant finial at top and bottom. The field around it is an all over arrangement rather than open ground, with narrow hooked vine stems carrying vases, comb-like cypress forms, fan palmettes, 4 petal blossoms and small bird-tail leaves, mirrored exactly across both axes. Each of the 4 corners carries a teal green spandrel enclosing a navy palmette with a crimson flower head, cleanly cut off by the ivory guard stripe. The main border runs navy, filled with alternating striped leaf sprays and 8 point star rosettes on a turquoise vine, framed inside and out by ivory guard bands of reciprocal rosebuds and a fine sky blue reciprocal line at the edge.

The Color Palette: Raspberry Red, Teal and Ivory

The field reads as a cool raspberry red leaning toward magenta, a cochineal-type tone that photographs brighter in daylight (images 3 and 7) and settles deeper under lamplight (images 5 and 6). Against it the weaver set 2 distinct blues: a dark indigo navy for the main border and the medallion outline, and a lighter violet blue for the medallion body, which keeps the center from going flat. Teal and peacock green carry the corner spandrels and the smaller leaf work, ivory and soft cream hold the medallion core and both guard borders, and the accents run through saffron orange, rose pink, pale sage, sky blue and a near black outline wool used to sharpen the smallest motifs. If you are shopping the red and burgundy Persian rugs group, note that this one is a jewel-tone red, not an earth red, and it will sit better with navy, brass and cool greys than with terracotta.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia on the Azerbaijan plateau and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that revived the court medallion format for the modern market. Tabriz work is loom-and-designer work: the pattern is drawn on graph paper by a naqash and followed knot by knot, which is why the curved lines here close properly and the mirrored halves of the field match. Weavers in the town measure fineness in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, and the evidence of a careful weave is visible in the close-ups: tight horizontal knot rows, pile clipped low enough to read a 1 knot outline, straight boxed selvedges and original flat-woven ends with the cotton warps left as fringe. The wool is the firm, slightly glossy highland fleece the region is known for, and after roughly 4 decades it still stands up under its own weight rather than lying slack. For context on reading age in a weave like this, see our guide on how to date an Oriental rug.