Mashhad is in the far north-east of Iran, close to the Afghan and Turkmen borders, and it is one of the country's great commercial weaving cities. The rugs that carry its name are big, red and formal, and of the 44 we hold, 33 are over 75 square feet.
Three quarters of them are room rugs
Nineteen of our Mashhad rugs are over 110 square feet and another fourteen are between 75 and 110. Only four are under 45. In a catalog where large rugs are about one in eight overall, this is a shelf you walk along when you have a room to fill rather than a corner to finish.
That is a city-workshop pattern, the same one you see in Kerman and Kashan: purpose-built looms, drawn designs, weaving as an industry rather than a household craft. The opposite case is Shiraz, where nothing we hold is bigger than a five by nine because the looms had to be portable.
Red, where Kerman is blue
Burgundy leads 27 of our Mashhad rugs and deep red another 26, with navy well behind at 11 and a little dark brown after that. Set that against Kerman, where navy leads 24 of 38, and you have the most useful distinction between the two: same scale, same formality, opposite temperature.
If the room is warm — timber, brass, terracotta, anything that wants deepening — Mashhad. If the room is cool and a red rug would fight it, Kerman. That one sentence will save you more time than any amount of reading about knot counts.
What they cost
From $190 to $2,625, with a median of $2,062 — the second most expensive origin we carry after Kerman at $2,250, and well above the $600 median across all our Persian rugs.
As everywhere, that is mostly size rather than prestige; our breakdown of what determines the cost of a rug shows the 8×10-and-up band jumping to a $2,100 median across every origin. The $190 end of the Mashhad range is one of the handful of small pieces, and it is the cheapest way into the origin if the large format is not what your room needs.
Low pile, dense drawing
Forty-three of the 44 have a low pile. The drawing is curvilinear and dense — medallions, spandrels, flowing vines — and on a rug this size a low pile is what keeps it legible from standing height rather than turning into a blur of red.
Who should buy one
Someone with a large, warm room that needs anchoring, and who is not afraid of red. A Mashhad does not sit quietly. It will set the temperature of the room and everything else will have to agree with it.
If that sounds like too much commitment, the same scale in a cooler register is Kerman, and the same warmth at a fifth of the price in a normal room size is Hamedan.
The shelf is at Mashhad rugs. Before you commit to a size this large, placing a rug in an open-plan space and the size guide are the two to read.
