6'6" x 10' Persian Nain Rug | Navy Blue & Ivory Floral Medallion | Wool & Silk Pile, 2000s

This is the classic navy and ivory formula that made Persian Nain rugs famous, woven at 6'6" x 10' in a fine wool pile with silk used to outline the drawing. Nothing about it is loud: the ground is a deep inky navy, the flowers are ivory and soft blue, and the silk catches light only where the weaver wanted an edge to read crisply. The pile is low and even, the handle is supple over a cotton foundation, and the condition is perfect, with no wear, no repairs and full original pile from selvage to selvage. Dated to the 2000's, it is a modern-age piece in the traditional Nain workshop style rather than an antique, which is exactly why the colors are still this clean. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The navy ground is not a plain rectangle: it is drawn as one enormous lobed oval floating inside an ivory surround, so the field itself reads as a single vast medallion shape with the ivory corners closing in around it. At dead center sits a radiating rosette, an 8 petal star built up in ivory, pale blue and soft brown, ringed by a scalloped crown of lanceolate petals and small palmettes. From there the field fills with an all over lattice of thin islimi vines, curling leaves and hundreds of small ivory blossoms, each one outlined so it lifts off the navy rather than blurring into it. The 4 corners carry mirrored quarter arrangements of the same vinery. The main ivory border runs a continuous scroll of palmettes and lotus blossoms in navy and blue, framed on both sides by narrow guard stripes with a running flower-and-leaf meander, and the whole thing is finished with a simple ivory outer edge. It is symmetrical, curvilinear, and drawn with the patience a design this dense demands.

A Deep Navy Field Against Ivory and Soft Blue

The two colors on the spec sheet do the heavy lifting, but the way they meet is what sells the rug. The field is a genuinely deep navy blue, closer to midnight than to royal, dark enough in the close-up photos to look almost black where the pile leans away from the camera, and it makes the ivory drawing read like frost on glass. The ivory itself is a warm natural cream rather than a bleached white, and it shifts toward soft beige in the border ground and in the woven ends. Between those two poles sit the secondary tones: a powder blue used in the medallion petals and throughout the vine work, a slightly grayer slate blue in the leaves, small touches of walnut brown at the flower centers, and a few tiny points of deep wine red in the guard stripes that you only notice up close. The silk highlights are where the light lives, so the palette changes noticeably as you walk around the rug or as daylight moves across the room.

Nain: The Weaving Town and the Weave

Nain is a desert town in central Persia, southeast of Isfahan on the rim of the great salt desert, and its weaving reputation is relatively young by Persian standards. The town made fine wool cloth for centuries and only turned seriously to rugs in the 20th century, taking its drawing vocabulary from the Isfahan workshops next door and then refining it into something instantly recognizable: navy and ivory, dense floral vinery, and silk used as an outlining thread rather than as a whole pile. Nain fineness is described in La, the number of plies twisted in the warp, and the finer the La the thinner the yarn and the tighter the knotting, which is how this much detail fits into a 6'6" x 10' area at all. You can see the result on the back in the last photo, where the knot rows are small, straight and perfectly regular against the ruler. At this size it sits in the most useful family of all, the 7x10 Persian rugs, big enough to anchor a seating group and still light enough to move on your own.