9' x 12'10" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Ivory Bird Border Garden Panel Design | Excellent Condition

This is a Bakhtiar in its best and most recognizable form: a 9' x 12'10" garden panel rug with roughly 150 small compartments filling the field, each one drawn as its own miniature flowerbed. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, and the drawing is considerably finer than the heavy village work most buyers picture when they hear the name, closer to the class dealers call Bibibaff. Laid flat in our Freeport showroom (images 2 and 3) it reads as a bright, busy, genuinely cheerful floor, and the pile is full and even edge to edge with clean ivory fringe at both ends. It sits comfortably in the family of 9 x 12 Persian rugs and ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the khesti, or brick, garden plan: a lattice of small squares separated by narrow ivory vine strips, each square given a single subject. Image 4 shows the vocabulary clearly, with rows of weeping willow, stylized cypress, a large curled boteh paisley, a flowering vase under an arch, a 4 petal blossom on a scrolling stem, and small mille fleurs beds of tiny buds. No two adjacent squares repeat their combination of ground color and motif, which is what keeps this all over panel design from turning mechanical. The main border is a different world entirely: an ivory ground carrying curved floral vine, large open blossoms and, as image 5 shows, pairs of small perched birds and a standing flower vase at the corner. Blue guard stripes with white rosettes frame it, and a fine dart and diamond outer stripe finishes both ends.

A Multi-Color Field Held Together by Ivory

Ivory is the organizing color here. It runs as the wide border ground and as the thin grid lines between every compartment, so the many field tones never collide. Inside the squares the palette moves through tomato red, deep aubergine and near black, navy and a lighter denim blue, old gold and camel, soft sage green, terracotta and a dusty rose that reads almost peach in the panels along the upper rows of image 1. Details are picked out in cream, sky blue and small touches of rust. In the border the ivory is warm and slightly creamy, with rose, pale lilac, brick red and gold flowers over blue tracery, and the guard stripes shift to a clear mid blue. The overall effect from standing height, as in image 3, is a warm multi-color mosaic rather than a single dominant shade, which makes the rug forgiving with existing furniture and wall color.

Bakhtiar Weaving in the Chahar Mahal

Bakhtiar rugs come from the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, woven in villages such as Shalamzar, Saman and Boldaji by settled families of the Bakhtiari confederation. The wool from those high pastures is tough and springy, and Bakhtiar weavers pair it with a strong cotton foundation and a firm beat-down, which is why these rugs are known as long-wearing floor rugs rather than delicate display pieces. What separates a good Bakhtiar from an ordinary one is control of the small compartment: keeping every square the same size and every motif correctly proportioned over 12'10" of length takes a practiced hand and a fine-enough knot count. Image 6 shows the back, with straight, tightly packed rows of knots and crisp color definition on the reverse, the mark of a carefully woven piece rather than a loose commercial weave.