7'7" x 11'5" Persian Qum Rug | All-Over Boteh Paisley on Ivory | Fine Wool Pile

This is the quiet kind of Persian rug that wins people over slowly. There is no medallion and no central focal point, just an ivory ground carried edge to edge with small boteh paisleys in staggered rows, each one drawn in a different combination of rose, navy, teal and olive. The wool pile is fine and evenly clipped, so the drawing reads sharply even at the scale of a motif barely 4 inches tall. At 7'7" x 11'5" it lands squarely in the most useful of the 8x11 Persian rugs range, large enough to hold a full seating group with the front legs of every chair on the wool. It is in excellent condition with clean ivory fringe at both ends, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, the materials and the hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a classic all-over boteh design, the teardrop paisley that Persian weavers have used for centuries as a symbol of the cypress bending in the wind. Here the boteh are outlined in dark green and navy, filled with rose and terracotta, and each one curls over a small paired leaf at the base. Between them the weaver filled every inch of ground with tiny palmettes, split leaves, rosettes and blue budding sprays, so the ivory reads as lattice work rather than empty space. The main border is the best part: an ivory band of rose flowering vases and upright rosebushes, alternating with small blossoming shrubs, framed inside and out by salmon guard stripes carrying a running chain of blue and ivory boteh cartouches. The outermost edge finishes in plain salmon red, which is what gives the whole piece its warm glow from across a room.

The Ivory Palette and Its Accents

The ground is a soft ivory with a faint cream and oatmeal tone rather than a bleached white, which is why the rug sits comfortably with both warm woods and cooler grey upholstery. Against it the weaver worked a genuinely wide accent palette: rose pink and salmon in the paisley bodies and border flowers, deep navy and a lighter teal blue in the small leaves and rosettes, olive and forest green in the boteh outlines, and camel and taupe in the curling stems. None of these colors dominates, so from standing height the rug reads as ivory with a soft rose cast, and only up close does the blue and green work reveal itself. The salmon red outer edge is the single strongest note and it frames the pale field cleanly. Colors shift with the light, so expect the field to look creamier under lamplight and cooler by day.

Qum Weaving in Central Persia

Qum sits in central Persia, south of Tehran, and although it is a young weaving city by Persian standards it became one of the most demanding almost immediately, because its workshops competed directly on fineness rather than volume. That rivalry is why Persian Qum rugs are known for the tightest drawing in the country, and it shows here in motifs small enough that a coarser weave simply could not resolve them. This example is woven in wool on a cotton foundation, knotted tightly enough that the back shows a crisp, regular grid of knots with no slack or wander in the rows, and the sides and ends are finished to the same standard as the field. Wool Qum pieces like this one are the practical members of the family, carrying the city's precision into a rug you can actually live on year after year.