Espresso and Ivory Mahi Medallion Tabriz, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. A full Tabriz composition at this size — herati field, lobed medallion, pendants, spandrels and a multi-band border, all inside 61 by 92cm — depends on a very high knot count; the herati is drawn too fine to resolve into separate repeats even under magnification.

Be realistic about the ivory. It is the border ground, the medallion and the spandrels, so it accounts for a great deal of a small rug, and it is the palest wool here by a wide margin. The dark field is forgiving and densely drawn. At this size the piece will sit in a doorway, at a bedside or on a wall, and the wall suits it particularly well — the drawing rewards being looked at closely rather than walked over.

Sample the ivory of the medallion and the ivory of the border ground, and convert both to Lab. The distance between them is 2.10. On the scale this catalogue uses to match colours, anything under three counts as an excellent match — so these are not two similar creams but the same wool, used twice. The dark field they sit against is 67.65 away from both.

That makes the composition unusually simple underneath all the detail. There are two grounds, not three: one very dark, one ivory, and the ivory appears in two places — as the frame around the outside and as an island at the centre. The medallion is not an ornament laid on top of the field so much as the border reappearing in the middle of it, or a window cut through the dark to the same pale ground beneath. Everything else — the herati repeating across the field, the palmettes in the border, the rust and pale blue and gold that make up the drawing — is detail hung on that one relationship. It is also why a rug of this size holds together at all: five separate colour families each take more than three per cent of a surface barely half a square metre, and without a structure that plain the result would simply be busy.