10'2" x 13'5" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Floral Medallion Design | Signed Border Cartouche

This is a full room-size Kashan in the classic workshop format, 10'2" x 13'5" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, and it is signed: a small green and red cartouche is woven into the upper border, which tells you a named workshop stood behind it rather than an anonymous commercial loom. The pile is a full 3/8" and shows no wear, no repairs and no open areas, and the drawing holds its rhythm from one end of a 13'5" length to the other, which is the hard part at this size. It shops as one of the true 10x13 Persian rugs that can carry a large living room or a long dining table without looking crowded. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the textbook Kashan formula, drawn with unusual patience. At the center sits a lobed, stepped medallion: a navy ground carrying palmettes and curling vine, an ivory inner cartouche outlined in fine red, and at its heart a blue 8 petal rosette with a small red bud at the middle. Slender pendants reach out from the top and bottom of the medallion into the field. Around it the red ground is not left open but filled edge to edge with an all-over floral system of Shah Abbasi palmettes, rosettes, tulip forms and lanceolate leaves on thin connecting vines, all of it mirrored across both axes. Navy spandrels close the 4 corners with dense arabesque scrollwork and ivory highlights. The border scheme runs to 5 bands: a wide navy main border of alternating palmettes and vine, framed on both sides by light blue guard stripes of small floral meander, with narrow ivory and gold reciprocal ribbons separating each one. The signature cartouche breaks the main border at the top, a deliberate touch rather than an accident of the pattern.

Colors in This Kashan

The field is a deep, saturated true red, warm rather than orange, with the faint tonal movement through it that only comes from wool dyed in batches and knotted by hand. Against it the navy of the medallion, spandrels and main border reads almost black in the low-light photograph and opens up to a clear inky blue in the close-ups. Between those two weights sit the light blue guard borders, a soft dusty sky tone that lifts the whole frame and keeps the navy from feeling heavy. The detail work is where the palette really lives: sage and moss greens in the leaves, ivory and cream in the medallion core and the reciprocal ribbons, soft rose and pale pink in the flower heads, gold and ochre accents on the palmettes, and small touches of light brown and pale blue scattered through the vine. Ivory outlining around the medallion and spandrels does the structural job of separating red from navy so the pattern stays legible from across a room. The overall impression is a red and navy rug with green and ivory as the working accents, formal from a distance and surprisingly colorful up close.

Kashan Origin and Weaving Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that produced some of the most important carpets ever woven. The town's local wool is soft and lustrous, which is why a Kashan takes color the way this one does and why its pile keeps a slight sheen under lamplight. The classic formula of red field, navy lobed medallion and ivory spandrels is a Kashan invention, and it became so completely the shorthand for a Persian rug that when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. If you want the longer background, our guide to Persian Kashan rugs covers the town, the dye tradition and how to judge one. On this piece, the back shown in the photograph is even and tight, the knots sit in straight orderly rows, and the fine outlines in the medallion and the small blossoms in the guard borders are only possible at a respectable knot count. Add the woven signature and you have a workshop Kashan in perfect condition at a size that is genuinely hard to find.