13'2" x 19'4" Persian Nain Rug | Blue and Ivory Wool and Silk | Palace Size, Never Used

Measuring 13'2" x 19'4", this is a palace size Persian Nain rug woven in the 2000s and never put down in a home. The field is a clear medium blue, a departure for a town that built its name on ivory and pale grounds, and it carries an all-over arabesque vine drawn in ivory, olive brown and silk highlighted sky blue. The pile is wool and silk on a cotton foundation, with silk reserved for outlines, stems and flower centers, so the drawing lifts and dims as you walk the length of the room. Looms capable of holding a Nain weave at nearly 20 feet are uncommon, which is why most oversize Persian rugs at this scale come off far coarser village looms instead. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a pale blue 8 petal rosette set inside a large ivory starburst medallion, which radiates outward through 3 rings of burgundy palmettes and olive brown leaf forms before dissolving into the blue field. Slender pendants extend from the medallion along the long axis, each finished with its own small ivory cartouche. The field itself is not empty ground between motifs: a continuous arabesque vine, drawn in thin red and ivory lines, links lotus blossoms, split palmettes and feathery serrated leaves in a network that repeats without ever quite mirroring itself. The 4 corners carry deep burgundy spandrels filled with curling ivory arabesques, and they are the single strongest counterpoint to all that blue. The wide ivory main border runs a stately procession of blue and burgundy palmettes joined by brown vine, flanked on both sides by salmon guard stripes and narrow navy minor stripes of paired rosettes. One end border holds a small woven cartouche, the traditional mark of the workshop that set this piece on the loom.

Color: Medium Blue, Ivory, Olive Brown and Burgundy

The field is a saturated medium blue, closer to a clear lapis than to the near black navy usual in Persian city weaving, and it reads as a single even color across all 19'4" with no abrash banding. Against it the ivory drawing is bright and slightly creamy, and the silk passages within it catch light as a cooler, almost white flash. Olive brown carries the vine stems and a large share of the leaf work, giving the field a warm underlayer that keeps the blue from going cold. Burgundy is used with restraint, exactly as the spec describes: the 4 corner spandrels, the ring of rosettes around the medallion, and scattered blossom centers that pull the eye across the field. Sky blue and a few teal green touches sit inside the flower heads at the finest scale. The border palette shifts warmer, with ivory ground, salmon pink guard bands and inky navy outlines, so the frame reads soft and light while the interior stays deep.

Nain: The Town and the Quality of the Weave

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and for centuries it wove fine wool cloth rather than rugs. When that trade declined in the 1930s the town turned its looms to knotting and borrowed the Isfahan drawing tradition wholesale: curved line, flowing vine, precise repetition, all of which only hold together at a high knot count. Nain fineness is graded by the La count, the number of threads twisted into each warp, and collectors chase the Nain 6La and Habibian pieces at the top of that scale. What you can see in the photographs here is the evidence itself: crisp silk outlining that never bleeds, borders that turn the corner cleanly on all 4 sides, and a back with the tight even grain of a properly tensioned loom. On a rug 13'2" x 19'4", holding that discipline over roughly 255 square feet is the real achievement.