12'9" x 18'11" Persian Nain Rug | Oversize Navy & Ivory Floral Medallion | Wool & Silk Pile

Spread out flat, this 12'9" x 18'11" Persian Nain rug reads as one continuous drawing rather than a large field padded out with repeats. A single ivory star medallion sits at the center of a midnight navy ground, the vinework runs unbroken to all 4 corners, and the ivory border frames the whole thing without crowding it. The pile is wool with silk used to outline the blossoms and stems, so the pattern lifts slightly off the ground and shifts as you walk past. At nearly 13 by 19 feet it belongs with the genuine oversize Persian rugs, woven on a loom dressed for one piece and nothing else. It is a recent weaving in perfect condition and ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The medallion is a many-lobed ivory star built in rings: a small grey rosette at the dead center, then 4 sky blue palmettes turned in toward it, then a wide band of ivory ground scattered with dark navy and brown flower heads, and finally a serrated outer edge that fires out into the field like petals. Stepped pendants reach off the top and bottom of the medallion into the navy. Four ivory spandrels close the corners of the field, each filled with its own palmette cluster and curling cloudband leaves rather than a flat mirrored copy. Between them the navy ground carries a thin islimi vine lattice loaded with lotus heads, split palmettes, carnation sprays, 5 petal rosettes and long serrated leaves. The main ivory border alternates a rosette medallion with a turning leafy vine, flanked by camel and pale blue guard stripes.

Midnight Navy, Ivory and the Blues in Between

The field is a deep saturated navy, closer to midnight than to royal blue, and dense enough that it reads almost black in low light and clearly blue under a lamp. Against it the drawing is ivory, warm rather than stark white, with the silk outlines catching light at a different angle from the wool around them. Inside that ivory framework sit two distinct blues, a soft powder blue used for stems and small flower heads and a stronger mid sky blue used in the medallion core and in the border rosettes. Camel and pale tan carry the inner and outer guard stripes and warm the whole palette. Sage grey fills many of the leaves, and small accents of chocolate brown and deep burgundy appear as flower centers, which is what keeps the navy and ivory from reading flat.

Nain, the Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and came to rug weaving late. The town spent centuries producing fine wool cloth for cloaks, and when that trade thinned in the 1930s the same spinners and dyers turned their hands to knotting, borrowing the curved-line design vocabulary of the Isfahan workshops. That history shows here in the fineness of the yarn and in the restraint of the palette. The tell of a real Nain is the silk outline, the same fiber that gives Persian silk rugs their sheen, used sparingly around each blossom rather than across the whole pile. On a cotton foundation, over a span this wide, the vine lines stay genuinely curved instead of stepping, and the medallion holds true symmetry from side to side, which only happens when the knot count is high and the weavers stayed with one cartoon from start to finish.