3'6" x 5' Persian Nain Rug | Navy Medallion in Wool and Silk | Signed 6La Habibian, Never Used

This is a small piece with a serious weave behind it. At 3'6" x 5", it sits at the top end of 3x5 Persian rugs, yet the drawing packs in a full medallion, four corner spandrels and a complete floral border system without a single crowded inch. It was woven in the 2000's, stored rolled and never put on a floor, so the pile stands upright and the ivory ground still has its original brightness. A woven cartouche sits at the top of the navy field, and the silk highlights that outline the flowers catch light at a different angle than the wool around them, which is the tell that separates real Persian Nain rugs from the copies. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered rosette medallion built on 8 petals, each petal drawn in light blue and outlined in silk, with a small burgundy and navy flower head at the very core. From the medallion, thin arabesque vines sweep outward in long curving arcs, carrying palmettes, lotus heads and tiny star flowers across the field in perfect mirror symmetry top to bottom and side to side. Two slender pendants extend from the medallion along the vertical axis, and the 4 corners of the field are closed off by ivory spandrels filled with their own scrolling vine work, so the navy ground reads as a shaped oval rather than a plain rectangle. The main border is a cream ground carrying alternating rosettes and small lily forms, flanked by a light blue band of dense arabesque scroll and framed by narrow guard stripes. Round roundels with a diamond lattice center punctuate the border corners, a classic Nain finishing detail visible clearly in the corner photographs.

A Deep Navy Field Framed in Ivory, Cream and Light Blue

Navy blue is the anchor here, a dark indigo tone that goes almost black in low light and opens up to a clear blue where sunlight hits the pile. Against it, the drawing works in three lighter registers: a pale sky blue for the vine tracery and petal fills, a warm ivory to cream for the border ground and the flower bodies, and a soft beige with touches of tan where the silk highlights outline the leaf edges. Small points of deep burgundy sit at the flower centers and inside the border rosettes, just enough warmth to keep the palette from reading cold. The light blue inner border band is the strongest secondary color and is what gives the rug its lift when seen from a standing position. Because navy and ivory are the two most placeable colors in a room, this rug sits comfortably with warm wood floors, painted furniture or a deep blue upholstered chair, as the styled photograph shows.

Nain: The Weaving Town and the Quality of This Weave

Nain is a desert town east of Isfahan that only turned to rug weaving in the 20th century, when its cloth weavers moved to the loom and brought a textile maker's precision with them. The town's reputation rests on fineness, and Nain grades itself by La, the number of plies in the warp yarn: the fewer the plies, the finer the knot. A 6La weave, as here, is the collector tier, and the approximate 500 knots per square inch confirmed by the back of this piece is what lets the drawing keep a true curved line through such small motifs. The Habibian atelier is the name most often cited at the top of that tradition, and pieces in the 6La and Habibian Nain class are bought as much for the weave as for the pattern. Turn this rug over and the pattern is fully legible on the cotton foundation, knot by knot, which is the honest test of a fine hand-knotted rug.