4'6" x 6'7" Persian Kashan Rug | Antique Floral Medallion | Terracotta & Navy Wool

Older city weaving in a small format is where you see a workshop's real discipline, because there is nowhere for a loose drawing to hide. This 4'6" x 6'7" piece belongs firmly in the tradition of Persian Kashan rugs: a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation, a single lobed medallion floating on a densely drawn floral field, and a palette that has softened with time rather than faded out. The reverse, shown against a ruler in the last photograph, reads clean and tight with the knot nodes clearly defined, which is the honest way to judge a rug of this age. It is the practical 5 x 7 rug footprint that suits a seating area, a bed foot or a study. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a small ivory rosette ringed by a navy lobed medallion, with paired pendants running out along the long axis and a fine outlined cartouche shape enclosing the whole unit. Around it the field is worked as a continuous floral lattice: palmettes, split leaves, eight petal rosettes and thin scrolling vines that never repeat in an obvious block, so the eye keeps moving. Four corner spandrels in olive gold frame the field and carry their own vine work, drawn in the same hand as the centre. The main border is a navy ground carrying alternating tulip and palmette heads linked by a delicate lozenge chain, fenced by narrow guard stripes of reciprocal flowerheads on ivory and rose. It is a curvilinear, drawn-on-paper design rather than a village improvisation, and the symmetry across all 4 corners is what tells you it came off a proper cartoon.

A Terracotta Field Against Deep Navy

The field reads as a warm terracotta, closer to brick and salmon than to a bright red, and it shifts noticeably with the light: cooler and more rose toward the ends, warmer and more copper across the middle where the pile catches the nap. Against it the navy of the medallion and the main border sits almost black in shadow and resolves into a soft indigo in direct light. The secondary colours are what give the rug its depth, with sea green and teal in the leaves, an olive to mustard gold in the spandrels and border ground detail, dusty rose in the guard stripes, and small hits of ivory in the flowerheads that act like points of light scattered across the field. Nothing is loud. The whole palette has the settled, slightly powdery quality that older wool takes on once the dyes have mellowed, which is exactly why these pieces sit so easily with painted walls, antique wood and plain upholstery.

Kashan, Central Persia

Kashan lies in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving pedigree runs back to the Safavid court workshops. The city built its name on soft, lustrous local wool and on a single recognisable formula of a red field, a navy lobed medallion and contrasting spandrels, executed with the tight, even knotting that a curved floral drawing demands. Kashan is also the Persian rug most Americans have already seen without knowing it: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. On this piece the weave is close and regular, the wefts are straight, and the selvages and ends are intact with full cream fringe at both ends, which is the profile of a town workshop piece that was made well and then looked after.