10'11" x 11'9" Persian Nain Square Rug | Wool and Silk Estate Piece | 1980s Ivory Field

A 10'11" x 11'9" rug is 10 inches off being a perfect square, and that is a shape almost nobody weaves on speculation. This one was made in Nain in the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool with silk used for the outlines, and it came out of a private estate. The field is ivory, the medallion is a soft sky blue and camel disc set slightly high of center as the photographs show, and the whole field is filled with fine vine work rather than left open. Anyone shopping square Persian rugs knows how thin the supply is at this size, which is the main reason a piece like this is worth the trip. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction. For background on the town and its weaving conventions, our guide to Persian Nain rugs is a useful companion to this listing.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic Nain: a round central medallion built in concentric rings, with an 8 petal rosette at the dead center, a ring of small cartouches around it, and a broad camel and olive halo that dissolves into the field instead of stopping hard. Above and below the medallion sit blue pendant motifs, and the 4 corners carry olive spandrels drawn with the same vocabulary at larger scale. Between all of that the field is covered edge to edge in a curving vine lattice hung with palmettes, split leaves and small multi petal blossoms, every element outlined in a pale thread so the shapes read cleanly against the ground. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a wide camel main border of alternating rosettes and leafy arabesques, flanked by navy guard stripes and a further ivory band of small scrolling flowers. The square proportion means the pattern radiates rather than runs, so the rug looks correct from all 4 sides of a room.

Ivory, Navy and Olive Through the Field

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and it carries the whole composition. Against it the palette stays in the cool half of the wheel: deep navy for the outlines and the guard borders, a lighter sky blue for the medallion ground and the pendants, and a great deal of olive green and khaki through the spandrels, the medallion halo and the leaf work. Camel and soft gold hold the main border, and small burgundy and dusty pink rosettes appear through the border flowers and here and there in the field, which is what keeps the cool blues from going flat. The silk outlining is the detail worth looking for in the close-up photographs, since it catches light at a different angle to the wool and makes the vine work shift between matte and bright as you walk past. Placed in a room with warm wood or cream walls, the field reads as a light neutral and the blue medallion becomes the accent.

Nain, Its Weavers and the Quality of This Weave

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and it is a young weaving town by Persian standards. The town made fine woolen cloth for generations, and when that trade fell away in the 1930s its craftsmen turned their spinning and dyeing skill toward rugs, borrowing the Isfahan drawing tradition and refining it into something recognizably their own: pale grounds, blue and ivory palettes, silk outlining and a level of finish that made the name collectible within a single generation. Nain quality is described by the La system, the number of plies twisted into each knot, and the finest workshop pieces are discussed in our article on Nain 6La and Habibian weaving. This 1980s example is a solid town weave on a cotton foundation, tight enough to hold the small floral heads and the silk outlines crisply, and heavy enough in the hand that it lies flat and stays put in a square room.