9' x 12' Persian Kerman Lavar Rug | Navy Blue Floral Medallion | 1980s, Excellent Condition

Hand-knotted in southeast Persia in the 1980s, this 9' x 12' Kerman is the kind of piece that anchors a formal room without shouting. The field is a deep navy blue, drawn edge to edge with flowering vine, and at the center sits a coral red medallion ringed in sky blue and beige. The wool pile is soft and lustrous with plenty of body left, the ivory fringe is full and even, and the drawing stays crisp through the spandrels and all three borders. It measures a true room size, which makes it one of the easier 9x12 Persian rugs to place under a sofa group or a dining table, and every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Kerman Lavar formula: a lobed central medallion with a beige and sky blue rosette core, surrounded by 16 serrated points, then a ring of large detached rosettes and palmette sprays floating free on the navy ground. Above and below the medallion sit gold and crimson pendant cartouches, each one filled with small orange blossoms and green leaf sprays, and the 4 corners carry beige spandrels inset with sky blue cartouches and brown outlined blossoms. The field vine is fine, almost drawn rather than woven, with slender stems that curl into 8 petal rosettes, buds and lanceolate leaves. Three borders frame it: a wide navy main border of undulating vine and paired palmettes, an ivory guard stripe of continuous floral scroll, and a sky blue outer stripe with small repeating medallion cartouches, finished with a coral selvedge line.

A Navy Ground Lit by Coral, Sky Blue and Peach

The dominant color is a saturated midnight navy, dark enough in the close-up shots to read almost black in the shadows and clearly blue where light hits the pile. Against it, the palette is unusually bright for a dark field rug: coral red in the medallion and the border blossoms, clean ivory in the vine scroll and guard stripe, a powdery sky blue that appears in leaves, cartouches and the outer stripe, warm beige and soft peach in the spandrels, plus small hits of saffron gold, pale pink and leaf green. The beige spandrels and ivory stripes lift the whole composition and keep the navy from closing in. If you are shopping specifically for navy blue Persian rugs, this one gives you the depth of a dark floor covering with a genuinely multi-colored surface, which makes it forgiving with both warm woods and cool greys.

Kerman and the Lavar Tradition

Kerman sits in the southeast of Persia and has been a weaving center for centuries, known less for raw knot count than for draftsmanship: the city's designers worked from detailed cartoons, and the pictorial garden border is the signature that collectors look for. Lavar, the town north of Kerman, gave its name to the finest end of that output, where the curved line is drawn tighter and the floral detail smaller, and this rug follows that school closely. The weave here is a cotton foundation with a hand-knotted wool pile, beaten down firmly enough to hold the fine vine work you can see in the border close-ups, yet the fleece stays soft underfoot because Kerman wool is long-stapled and takes dye beautifully. Forty-odd years on, the colors have mellowed just slightly, the pile is even, and the rug lies flat and square.