10'2" x 14'9" Persian Kashan Rug | Navy All-Over Floral Field | Excellent Condition

This is a full room size piece, 10'2" x 14'9", hand-knotted in central Persia on a cotton foundation with a dense 3/8" wool pile. The drawing is the formal side of the Kashan repertoire: a midnight navy ground carried edge to edge with scrolling vine and palmette work, resolved by a soft powder blue main border rather than the usual red. It reads as a serious, quiet rug, the kind that anchors a big room without shouting. Condition is excellent with no restoration, full pile and clean, even selvages, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. If you want the background on the type before you buy, our Persian Kashan rugs guide covers the town, the weave and what separates workshop pieces from the rest.

Design and Motifs

Instead of a single dominant medallion floating on open ground, the weaver filled the whole field with a continuous lattice of vine work. At the center sits a compact rosette built from concentric rings of lotus palmettes and curling split-leaf arabesques, with a small 8 petal flower head at the exact middle, but the pattern keeps running past it in every direction so the field never breaks. Large shield shaped palmettes repeat at the 4 corners of the inner field and again at the midpoints, linked by thin vine tendrils that loop back on themselves. Between them sit rows of rosettes, serrated acanthus leaves and small cypress-like sprays. The main border alternates broad palmette cartouches with fan-shaped floral heads, and it is framed by narrow guard stripes of running vine on both sides. Look at the close-up photographs and you can see how tightly the outlining is drawn: every flower head carries a fine ivory or gold contour that keeps the motif legible against the dark ground, which is the mark of a well-drawn cartoon rather than a copied one.

The Navy, Ivory and Rust Palette

The field is a deep midnight navy, close to indigo, and it darkens or lifts depending on how the light falls across the pile, which is why the rug looks almost black in the angled photograph and clearly blue in the detail shots. Over that ground the weaver worked in ivory and soft cream for the vine work and the outlines, then dropped in rust and brick terracotta at the palmette centers and on scattered flower heads to give the field warmth. Saffron and old gold appear through the central rosette and the larger cartouches, and there are small notes of sage green, pale sky blue and a few deliberate pinpricks of true red that stop the pattern from going flat. The main border is the real surprise: a pale powder blue, nearly periwinkle, that separates the dark field from the room and keeps a rug this large from feeling heavy. Ivory guard stripes and the natural ivory fringe finish the edges.

Kashan Weaving and Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. The town is known for soft, lustrous local wool and for a disciplined asymmetric knot that holds fine floral drawing without the line breaking up, which is exactly what you see here in the outlining of the palmettes. It is also the most recognizable Persian design in America: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. At 10'2" x 14'9" this is a genuine room size weave that took a wide loom and two weavers working side by side, and pieces at this scale in unrestored condition are far less common than the 9x12 format, so it belongs with the better oversize Persian rugs we carry. The pile still stands a full 3/8", the handle is firm, and the back is even from end to end.