10'1" x 12'4" Persian Isfahan Rug | Navy Floral Medallion | Najafabad Weave, 1980s

This is a classical Isfahan floral carpet design worked at full room scale, woven in Persia in the 1980s and still carrying a full, even wool pile. The drawing is the giveaway: a sky blue and ivory medallion sits dead center on a deep navy ground, and every vine leaving that medallion curves rather than turns, which is what separates an Isfahan workshop cartoon from a village copy. At 10'1" x 12'4" it covers a full seating group with the medallion still reading as the center of the room, and it sits squarely in the range buyers search when they look for 10x13 Persian rugs. Wool pile on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted, and shipped with a certificate of authenticity that records origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field is built around a large lobed medallion whose sky blue interior is filled with its own miniature garden: an 8 petal rosette at the very center, paired crimson blossoms on fine stems, and scrolling arabesques that spiral back on themselves inside an ivory cusped outline. Around it the navy ground is not left open. It carries a dense all-over system of curling saz leaves, coral palmettes, small blue cartouches and white flowerheads, all hung on vines thin enough to stay legible at this scale. The 4 corners repeat the medallion vocabulary in peach spandrels, so the eye reads a complete frame rather than a floating centerpiece. Borders run in three bands: a wide navy main border of large curled leaves and rosettes on ivory stems, flanked by a peach guard stripe of paisley and blossom and a narrow blue vine stripe, closed with a fine sawtooth edge and ivory cotton fringe.

A Navy Field Lit by Coral, Peach and Sky Blue

The ground is a deep midnight navy that photographs almost black in the wide shots and opens up into true indigo in the close details. Against it the palette is warm rather than cool: coral and burnt orange in the palmettes, rose and crimson in the small blossoms, soft peach and salmon in the vine work, and ivory picking out the flowerheads and outlines so the drawing never muddies. Sky blue does the structural work, filling the medallion, the guard stripe and dozens of leaves so there is a light thread running from the center out to the edge. Soft beige and pale sage appear in the smaller leaf tips. The result is a rug that grounds a room in dark blue but reads warm under lamplight, which is why this colorway sits comfortably with both cherry and walnut furniture and with off-white upholstery.

Najafabad and the Isfahan Weaving Tradition

Isfahan in central Persia has been a design capital since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century, and its reputation rests on drawing: the curved line, the flowing vine, the precision of a repeated palmette. Najafabad, the weaving town just west of the city, works from the same cartoons and the same floral vocabulary at a heavier, more durable handle, which is how a piece this size gets woven at all. You can read that in person here, in the tight even knotting visible on the folded corner and in the wool, which is dense and slightly lustrous under the hand. If you want the wider background on the city, its workshops and how quality is judged, see our complete guide to Isfahan rugs. Forty years on, this one still stands with full pile and straight, original sides.