9' x 10'9" Persian Mashad Rug | Deep Red Floral Field, Navy Medallion | 1980s Wool

Measuring 9' x 10'9", this is a city-woven Persian Mashad rug from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and kept in excellent condition. The pile still stands full and even across the whole field, the ivory cotton fringe is intact at both ends, and the deep red outer skirt has held its saturation with no sun stripe. It is a proper room-size piece: wide enough to sit under a full seating group and long enough to read as a floor for the room rather than an island in it. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and knotting.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Mashad formula, executed with a lot more care than the usual commercial version. At the centre sits a lobed navy medallion carrying a terracotta cartouche, and inside that a single 8 petal rosette in blue, ivory and rose. The medallion sends out slim pendant finials top and bottom, each capped with a small palmette. Around it the red field is filled edge to edge with a fine scrolling vine, carrying rosettes, curled sickle leaves and tiny budding sprays that turn and mirror on the vertical axis rather than repeating mechanically. The 4 corners are anchored by navy spandrels drawn with the same vocabulary, so the field reads as one continuous garden interrupted by the medallion. The main border is a navy ground carrying large serrated palmettes and split leaves, flanked by ivory guard stripes of linked rosettes and vine, with narrow blue minor bands and a plain red outer band before the selvedge.

A Deep Red Field Worked in Indigo, Green and Ivory

The field is a true deep red with a slight cherry lift where the light catches the pile, the shade that puts this firmly among red and burgundy Persian rugs rather than the browner brick tones of village weaving. Against it the weaver set a dark indigo navy for the medallion, the spandrels and the main border, which is deep enough to read almost black at a distance and then opens into separate blues up close: sky blue in the flowerheads, a mid denim in the vine work, and a pale powder blue on the leaf outlines. Green does real work here, an olive to moss tone running through the serrated leaves and the palmette bases, cooling the red where a lesser rug would go straight to gold. Ivory keeps the whole thing legible, outlining the medallion, filling the guard stripes and picking out individual blossoms, while terracotta and a soft rose pink warm the medallion centre and the border cartouches. Small touches of dark brown and umber sit at the edges of the palmettes for depth.

Mashad, the Weaving City of Khorasan

Mashad is the great city of Khorasan in northeastern Persia, and its workshops have built their reputation on curvilinear medallion designs drawn on paper by a professional designer and then followed knot for knot by the loom. That workshop discipline is visible here in the symmetry of the corners, the unbroken sweep of the vine and the clean outlining of every flowerhead. Khorasan wool is long-stapled and takes dye beautifully, which is why Mashad reds age into this kind of depth instead of going chalky; the closer photographs show how the pile holds a sheen as it leans with the nap. The handle is supple rather than stiff, the back is evenly knotted with no pulled rows, and the sides and ends are original. For a piece woven in the 1980s and never put into heavy service, it has decades of floor life in front of it.