10'4" x 14'6" Persian Kashan Rug | All-Over Kerman Kashan Floral Design | 1970s, Excellent Like New

This is a full room size Persian Kashan rug from the 1970s, hand-knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation and measuring 10'4" x 14'6". The pile still stands high and even, the deep red has the clean saturated tone of good madder-family dyeing, and the ends and sides are straight and intact, which is why it grades excellent and like new. At 150 square feet it covers a true great room or a long formal dining table with chairs pulled out, and it sits comfortably in the same footprint buyers search for when they look at 10x14 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, age and size.

Design and Motifs

Instead of a single central medallion, the field is drawn as a continuous flowering garden, one of the most demanding compositions in the all-over floral rugs family because the weaver has to hold symmetry across 14 feet with no medallion to anchor the eye. Thin scrolling vines carry lobed palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, star blossoms, tulips and serrated saz leaves, with small butterflies and tiny sprays of blossom filling the ground between them. At the top and bottom of the field a vase form rises on the vertical axis and opens into a flowering shrub, and the 4 corners repeat matching cloudband and palmette clusters so the drawing reads as one panel rather than a repeating tile. The wide ivory main border alternates large paired palmette cartouches with rosette bouquets, framed by cornflower blue guard stripes of leaf and blossom meander and closed by a narrow red outer band.

A Deep Red Field Against Ivory and Cornflower Blue

The field is a deep true red, warm rather than orange, and it holds its tone evenly from end to end across the whole 14'6" length. Against it the palette is unusually cool: navy and mid cornflower blue do most of the work in the palmettes and vine heads, supported by soft sky blue, sage and olive green in the leaves, rose pink and coral in the smaller blossoms, and touches of soft gold and camel in the vine scrolls. Ivory is the balancing color, used both for the wide main border and for hundreds of small white blossoms scattered through the red ground, which keeps the field from reading heavy. The close detail photograph shows how many separate shades are in play within a single palmette, and the angled floor shot shows the light sheen the wool takes when the pile is viewed with the nap.

Kashan Weaving and the Kerman Kashan Drawing

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan and has woven to court workshop standards since the Safavid period, working with soft, lustrous local wool and a precise curved line. This piece is a Kashan weave carrying a drawing the trade calls Kerman Kashan, meaning the dense garden field and the cartouche border owe their layout to classic Kerman rug designs while the knotting, wool and finish are pure Kashan. The reverse photograph shows the weave clearly: tight, regular rows, crisp color changes with no bleed, and enough knots per square inch to keep the small blossoms and butterflies legible at this scale. Kashan is also the design most people have already seen without naming it, since when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor.