6'8" x 10'1" Persian Nain Rug | Ivory Wool & Silk Floral Medallion | 500 KPSI 6La, Never Used

This is a workshop piece from the 2000s that was rolled and stored rather than walked on, and it shows: the pile still stands full height, the silk outlines are still bright, and the ivory ground has never taken a single footprint. Woven at roughly 500 knots per square inch in wool with silk detailing on a cotton foundation, it belongs to the small group of fine Persian Nain rugs that weavers reserve their best material for. The 6La (shesh la) construction, explained in our guide to Nain 6La and Habibian weaving, is what lets the drawing stay this crisp at this scale. At 6'8" x 10'1" it sits squarely in the most usable of the 7x10 Persian rug proportions, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a round medallion built in concentric rings: a small rosette core, a ring of dark navy cloud-band cartouches, then a wide band of pale blue palmettes drawn with hooked, heart-shaped edges, finished with a fine sunburst of radiating points. From the medallion the field opens into a continuous arabesque of thin vines that loop, split and rejoin across the whole ivory ground, carrying Shah Abbasi palmettes, small lotus heads, curled saz leaves and tiny five petal blossoms. Nothing is stamped or repeated mechanically; each quarter mirrors the next but the small flowers change color as they travel. Four corner spandrels echo the medallion in reduced form, and the main border runs a slow procession of large flower heads and paired leaves between two narrow guard bands of running vine. The silk is used exactly where it should be, outlining petals and stems so the drawing lifts off the wool ground under raking light.

A Study in Ivory, Blue and Burgundy

The field is a warm, clean ivory, closer to fresh cream than white, and it makes up the great majority of the surface, which is why the rug reads so light in a room. Against it the blues do the structural work: deep indigo navy in the vine stems, the medallion core and the border outlines, then a soft powder blue and a mid sky blue in the medallion ring and the larger palmettes. Burgundy appears in measured doses, in flower centers, in some of the leaf tips and in small buds scattered through the field, and it is what keeps the palette from going cold. Look closer and there is teal green in the leaves, a muted rose in the smaller blossoms, and a pale camel tone in a few of the vine scrolls. The wool takes light with a low sheen while the silk outlines catch it sharply, so the colors shift a half step as you cross the room.

Nain: the Town and the Weave

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and its weaving tradition is young by Persian standards, dating from the 1930s when the town's fine wool cloth trade collapsed and its craftsmen turned to the loom. They brought textile-grade precision with them, and within two generations Nain was producing some of the most tightly drawn curvilinear work in Persia. The 6La designation refers to how many plies the warp yarn is divided into, and fewer plies means finer yarn, more knots across the same span and cleaner curves; that is the difference you see in the medallion of this piece, where an 8 petal rosette and a ring of cartouches occupy a space many workshops would fill with a single flower. The back, visible in the last photograph, tells the same story: an even, tight grid on a cotton foundation with no slack rows and no shortcuts, the mark of a proper Nain workshop weave.