6'9" x 9'8" Persian Nain Rug | Signed Ivory and Blue Wool and Silk | 500 KPSI, Unused

This is a signed, workshop-grade Persian Nain rug woven in the 1980s and kept in storage ever since, so the pile has never taken a footstep. At 6'9" x 9'8" it sits squarely in the most useful 7x10 Persian rug range, big enough to anchor a seating group without swallowing a room. The pile is wool with silk drawn through the outlines and flower heads at roughly 500 knots per square inch, which is why the drawing stays crisp at the scale of a single petal. A cartouche is woven into the ivory upper border, the mark of a named atelier rather than an anonymous commercial loom, and the piece is attributed to the Habibian workshop, the most respected name in Nain. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The field is built around an 8 petal star medallion set on a small green core, with four large satellite rosettes placed at the corners of the field so the eye moves in a diamond around the center. Between them runs a continuous lattice of thin scrolling vine, lotus palmettes, curled saz leaves and tiny 5 petal blossoms, drawn so evenly that no two quadrants read as a copy of one another. Cloud band arabesques and split leaf tendrils fill the space above and below the medallion, and small pendant finials extend from the medallion top and bottom on the long axis. The main border carries a turtle palmette and vine repeat framed by narrow floral guard stripes on both sides, with a fine outer stripe of paired blossoms. This is a curvilinear drawing in the full city tradition, and at this knot count the curves genuinely curve instead of stepping.

Ivory Ground with Blue Silk Detailing

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to stark white, and it is the reason the rug reads as light in a room rather than dark and formal. Every vine and outline is worked in deep navy, which gives the pattern its structure, while the flower heads are shaded in sky blue, soft dove grey, sand beige and pale camel, with small burgundy accents in the border blossoms and a touch of green at the medallion center and in scattered leaves. The silk sits in the highlights: run a hand across the field and the blue petals and the finer outlines catch the light a half tone brighter than the wool around them, which is what gives the ivory field its quiet shimmer in the angled photographs. The overall palette is calm and cool, easy to live with against oak floors, white walls, walnut furniture or grey upholstery.

Nain Weaving and Quality

Nain sits on the edge of the desert in central Persia, east of Isfahan, and only turned to rug weaving in the 20th century when its fine cloth trade faded. The town brought the same standards with it, and within two generations Nain was producing some of the most precisely drawn work in the country, always on a cotton foundation with wool pile lifted by silk outlines. Fineness there is counted in la, the number of plies in the warp threads, and the finest looms belong to a handful of named workshops of which Habibian is the benchmark. At approximately 500 knots per square inch this piece is well above ordinary commercial Nain production, and the evidence is in the back: small, even, tightly packed knots with no slack in the line and no drift in the pattern across nearly 10 feet of length. Unused since the 1980s, the pile stands full and the colors have never been walked down.