6'5" x 10' Persian Nain Rug | Royal Blue Field with Ivory Star Medallion | Wool and Silk, Never Used

A royal blue field, an ivory star medallion and a wide cream border: this Persian Nain rug follows the town formula exactly, and it does it with silk worked into the outlines so the drawing catches light as you walk past it. The piece is brand new and has never been laid in a home, with the full 3/8" pile still standing and the ivory fringe untouched. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and construction. At 77" by 120" it falls into the 7x10 Persian rugs range, large enough to anchor a full seating group without pressing against the walls.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered star medallion built from 16 ivory points, each one filled with fine scrolling arabesques and closed at the tip with a small pointed lancet leaf. Ringing the core is a band of pale blue and olive palmettes, and a slender pendant drops from the top and bottom of the medallion into the open field. Away from the center the field is not empty for a moment: curling vine stems carry rosettes, split palmettes and long serrated leaves in a balanced all-over rhythm that mirrors itself across both axes. The wide ivory main border runs a classic palmette and meander scheme, large flower heads linked by a continuous vine that turns back on itself at each of the 4 corners, and it is flanked by narrow guard stripes carrying a small repeating blossom. The close-up photograph shows how tightly the silk outlines follow the curve of every stem, which is the whole point of the Nain drawing style.

Royal Blue, Ivory and the Silk Highlights

The ground is a true royal blue, deep and slightly inky where the light falls away and brighter, almost cornflower, where it catches the pile directly, which is why it reads a shade lighter in the angled photograph than in the overhead shot. Against it the ivory does most of the work: a warm cream in the border, a cooler bone white in the medallion points and the vine outlines. Between those two poles the weaver placed a soft turquoise and pale sky blue in the smaller blossoms, a muted olive and sage in the leaves, chestnut and cocoa brown along the heavier stems, and tiny dots of deep aubergine and burnt orange in the flower centers that keep the palette from going cold. The silk sits in the highlights rather than the ground, so the blue stays matte and calm while the pattern glints. This is the palette people look for in blue and navy blue Persian rugs, cool enough for a modern room and traditional enough for a formal one.

Nain: The Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Nain sits in central Persia on the western edge of the great salt desert, a short drive east of Isfahan, and that proximity explains everything about the design. The town spent generations weaving fine wool cloth for cloaks and only turned to knotting rugs in the 20th century, taking its drawing vocabulary straight from the Isfahan workshops: curved line, flowing vine, precise mirroring. Nain weavers build on a cotton foundation and traditionally mark their fineness by the number of plies twisted into each strand of the pile, which is where the familiar 9La, 6La and 4La grades come from. The back photograph tells the real story here, with small, even, well-seated knots and clean straight rows across the full 6'5" width, no drift in the border lines and a crisply overcast selvage. That regularity, combined with the silk outlining, is what separates a genuine Nain from the softer commercial copies of the same pattern.