10' x 13'9" Persian Kashan Rug | Deep Red Floral Field | Ivory Medallion | Excellent Pre-Owned

This is a true room size piece, 10' x 13'9" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, and it reads the way the best Persian Kashan rugs are supposed to read: a deep red field packed edge to edge with floral drawing, a soft ivory and faded blue medallion holding the center, and a wide navy border of paisleys and rosettes to close it in. The pile stands a full 3/8" and is even from end to end with no thin spots, which is unusual for a pre-owned rug of this scale and tells you it lived in a formal room rather than a traffic lane. It covers a 10x14 footprint comfortably, so compare it against our other 10x14 Persian rugs if you are measuring for a dining table or a long sitting room. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all over floral composition rather than an open ground, so the eye keeps moving. Curling split leaves, long serrated palmettes and small rosettes ride a vine scroll that repeats on both sides of the center axis, and the drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with no straight village lines anywhere in it. At the middle sits an 8 lobed medallion built in layers: a salmon core carrying a ring of small starburst rosettes, then an ivory band, then a faded blue surround interrupted by little fretwork brackets that step out into the red. Slender blue pendants reach north and south from the medallion toward the ends of the field. The border system runs 5 bands deep, the main one a navy ground filled with alternating boteh paisleys and large brown and pink rosette blossoms, flanked inside and out by ivory guard stripes and a narrow red cross and flowerhead ribbon that you can see clearly in the close-up photographs.

Deep Red, Faded Blue and Green in the Palette

The dominant note is a deep tomato red that warms toward brick where the light hits the pile and sits a shade cooler in the shadow of the knot, the kind of movement you only get from wool dyed in small lots. Against it the blue has mellowed to a soft faded slate, used for the medallion surround, the fretwork brackets and the vine work in the field, while the main border holds a darker indigo that anchors the whole rug. Green appears in measured doses, an olive sage in the leaves and a deeper bottle green in the smaller blossoms, and the secondary tones carry the rest: cream and ivory outlines, dusty rose and salmon pink in the flower heads, gold and ochre in the vine tips, and small marks of near black for definition. This is a classic choice among red and burgundy Persian rugs, warm enough to carry a cold room and busy enough to forgive a patterned sofa.

Kashan Weaving and Persian Origin

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving goes back to the Safavid court workshops, which is where this vocabulary of flowing vine, lobed medallion and multi band paisley border comes from. The town is known for soft lustrous local wool and for drawing that stays curved and controlled, and both show here: the outlines hold their shape through the tightest parts of the medallion and the pile still has a quiet sheen under light. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor, which is why so many buyers recognize this layout before they know the name of it. Construction is the traditional one, wool pile knotted onto a cotton warp and weft, and the back photograph shows the knot nodes running in tidy straight rows with the original woven selvedge and fringe intact.