6'4" x 9'6" Persian Nain Rug | Ivory Sky Blue Floral Medallion | Wool and Silk

This 6'4" x 9'6" rug is a classic city-workshop piece from Nain in central Persia, woven in the 2000s with a wool and silk pile on a cotton foundation. The drawing is quiet and precise: a single floral medallion at the center of an ivory field, every vine and palmette outlined by hand, with silk used to lift the small highlights so the pattern changes slightly as you walk around it. The pile is full, the selvages and ivory fringe are intact, and the condition is perfect. At roughly 76 inches by 114 inches it covers a seating area or a standard dining table without crowding the room, which puts it right in the range buyers search for when they shop 6x9 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity listing origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered 8 petal rosette medallion built from tulip-shaped lobes and heart-shaped petals, each one filled with its own small blossom rather than left as flat color. From there the field opens into an all over scheme of curling arabesque vines, Shah Abbasi palmettes, lotus rosettes and narrow serrated leaves, balanced so that the left and right halves mirror each other without becoming mechanical. Small pendant forms sit above and below the medallion on the long axis, and the field pattern carries straight out to the inner guard stripe instead of stopping at heavy corner spandrels. The border system is made of five bands: a tan outer stripe of repeating rosettes, a narrow blue and ivory ribbon, a wide ivory main border of alternating palmettes and vine scrolls, and two inner guards of tiny flower heads. The close-up of the corner shows how cleanly the border turns, a detail that separates workshop drawing from village copying.

A Palette of Ivory, Tan and Sky Blue

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to cream than chalk white, and it carries almost the whole field so the rug reads light in a room. The pattern is drawn in two blues: a soft powder or sky blue for the vine tracery and the medallion core, and a deep indigo that is used only as outline, which is what keeps the drawing crisp against the pale ground. Tan and light camel appear in the outer stripe and in the petal fills, with a few paler sage-toned leaves carrying the transition between the blue and the ivory. The only hot notes are small burgundy flower hearts, no bigger than a fingernail, scattered through the field and the border; they are enough to keep the palette from going flat. Silk is reserved for highlights on the palmettes and the medallion petals, so those areas sit brighter and glossier than the surrounding wool. The overall effect is ivory, tan and blue, which sits easily with oak floors, as the parquet photographs show.

Nain: the Town and the Weave

Nain sits on the western edge of the great central desert, about 90 miles from Isfahan, and it only turned to rug weaving in the 1930s when its long-established fine wool cloth trade collapsed. The weavers brought that textile discipline with them and borrowed the curved, flowing drawing of their Isfahan neighbours, which is why Nain rugs look like formal court work rather than tribal work. The standard build is the one used here: a cotton foundation for stability, a tightly clipped wool pile and silk worked in to outline or highlight motifs, with the pile cut low so the fine drawing stays readable. Nain quality is traditionally read from the number of plies in the warp, the La count, along with the sharpness of the outlining and how accurately the border turns the corner. Our complete guide to Nain rugs walks through that system in detail. On this piece the evidence is in the hand: a low, even pile, controlled curves in the arabesques and silk sitting exactly where the design calls for it.