12'8" x 18'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Garden Panel Khesti Design | 1980s Palace Size, Perfect Condition

At 12'8" x 18'7" this Bakhtiar covers roughly 235 square feet, which puts it in genuine palace territory and well beyond what most weaving families ever attempt on a single loom. It was knotted in the 1980s in fine wool on a cotton foundation, and the pile has stayed full and even across the whole field, with no thin areas, no repairs and no old wear. The drawing is the classic Bakhtiar khesti garden plan, a lattice of small framed panels that each carry their own flowering motif, and the weave here is noticeably tighter and more detailed than standard village Bakhtiar production, closer to what the trade calls Bibibaff work. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, the age, the hand-knotted construction and the all-wool pile. Pieces this large in this condition are among the harder things to find in 12 x 18 oversize Persian rugs.

Design and Motifs

The field is divided into hundreds of small rectangular compartments by narrow reciprocal dividers, the khesti or garden panel plan that Bakhtiar weavers made their own. No two neighboring panels repeat: one holds a flowering vase, the next a weeping willow, then a cypress, a single large rosette, a curling boteh, a spray of carnations, a pair of confronting arabesques. Each panel is drawn with its own miniature inner frame and its own ground color, so the whole surface behaves like a walled Persian garden seen from above, bed by bed. The panels step slightly on the diagonal, which keeps the grid from reading as rigid and gives the eye a direction to travel. Framing it all is a wide ivory main border of palmettes and scrolling vine, held between narrow sky blue guard stripes and a fine dark outer line, with the corners resolved cleanly rather than cut off, a detail that separates careful workshop-level drawing from quick village work.

A Multi-Color Garden Palette

The color work is the reason this rug holds attention at close range. Panel grounds alternate between warm ivory and cream, brick red, deep indigo navy, a bright saturated sky blue, forest green, burnt rust orange and a soft saffron gold, with flecks of pale pink and celadon inside the flower heads. Because the panels are small, no single color takes over: from across a room the field reads as a warm russet and blue mosaic, while from a few feet away the individual reds, greens and blues separate out. The ivory main border lifts the whole piece and gives it a clean edge against dark wood or stone flooring, and the sky blue guard stripes echo the blue panels so the border never feels detached from the field. The wool has a natural sheen visible in the close-up images, and the dyes have aged into the mellow, slightly deepened tone that only 40 years of settling produces.

Bakhtiar Origin and Weaving Quality

Bakhtiar rugs come from the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, woven in villages such as Shalamzar, Saman, Chaleshtar and Boldaji by settled Bakhtiari families whose flocks graze the Zagros highlands. That mountain wool is the foundation of the type: long staple, high in lanolin, springy underfoot and famously hard wearing, which is why Bakhtiar pieces survive decades of real household use while keeping their luster. Knotted on a cotton warp and weft and beaten down firmly, this one has the substantial hand and weight buyers expect from the group, and the panel drawing is finer than the district average, with small motifs rendered cleanly rather than blocked out. A piece of this scale is heavy freight anywhere else and still ships free here, as all of our oversized Persian rugs do, to all 50 states.