3'3" x 16'5" Persian Kashan Rug | Rare Long Runner | Baby Green Field with Triple Medallion | Excellent Condition

Runners this long almost never come up in a soft color. At 3'3" x 16'5" this is a 16 foot architectural piece, woven in the Persian Kashan tradition with a hand-knotted wool pile on a cotton foundation and finished at 3/8" so it clears door swings and sits flat along a baseboard. The length was clearly cut for a specific architecture: a long hallway, a gallery corridor, an upstairs landing that runs the depth of the house. Condition is excellent, with even pile across all 197 inches, straight selvedges and tight original fringe at both ends. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording size, origin, material and construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic Kashan logic stretched to runner proportions: 3 diamond medallions spaced evenly down a completely open field, each one outlined in dark navy with a serrated lobed edge and finished top and bottom with a small pendant finial, plus tiny bud motifs set in the field above and below. Inside each medallion sits an 8 petal rosette at dead center, ringed by curling arabesque vines, split palmettes and small multi-petal blossoms that fill the cartouche without crowding it. Because the field itself carries no all over pattern, the eye reads the 3 medallions as a rhythm rather than a repeat, which is exactly why this piece works in a corridor where you see it in sections rather than all at once. The border system is a main band of linked palmettes and rosettes on a dark ground, framed on both sides by narrow lilac guard stripes with running vine, and the corners are resolved cleanly so the pattern turns without a break.

A Baby Green Field with Teal, Ivory and Lilac

The field is a soft baby green, the sort of muted sage that shifts toward celadon in daylight and toward cool grey-green under lamplight, and it is woven as a single uninterrupted ground so the natural abrash in the wool is the only movement across 16 feet. Against it, the medallions read in deeper teal and olive green with ivory at the very center, which is where the drawing gets its glow. Scattered through each medallion are small blossoms in lilac and soft periwinkle, white-petalled flowers with gold hearts, and fine details in cinnamon, caramel and rust that keep the cool palette from going flat. The main border runs dark, near black navy, which anchors the whole runner and makes the pale field look lighter than it is, while the ivory ground of the outer band and the lilac guard stripes carry the lighter tones out to the edge. If you are furnishing around this piece, it belongs with the softer end of green Persian rugs rather than the saturated emeralds.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its workshops trace their formula back to the Safavid court weavers: lustrous local wool, a precise curvilinear cartoon, and the familiar discipline of a lobed medallion on a clear field. It is also the most recognizable Persian city weave in America, and the one people have seen without knowing it, because when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. What marks this runner as town work rather than village work is the way the medallions are drawn, with the curve of each arabesque held smoothly and the serrated medallion outline landing evenly on both sides of the center line, which only happens on a well-tensioned loom with a fine cotton warp. The close-up of the weave shows the knot rows running straight and consistently across the 39 inch width, and the 3/8" wool pile has been clipped low to keep that drawing legible. Finding that quality of drawing in a 16'5" length, in a pale green, is the genuinely scarce part.