7' x 10'10" Persian Nain Rug | Signed Habibian 6La Wool and Silk | Approx. 500 KPSI, Never Used

This is the piece Nain collectors wait for: a signed 6La weave at roughly 500 knots per square inch, woven in wool with silk outlining, and never put on a floor. Woven in the 2000's and held unused since, the pile still stands full and even, the fringe is original and untrimmed, and the cotton warps at both ends are clean and tight, as the ruler shot shows. The cartouche in the gold guard border carries the workshop signature, which on a Persian Nain rug of this grade is the difference between a good town weave and a named atelier piece. At 7' x 10'10" it sits squarely in the most usable of all room formats, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Nain formula and executes it at an unusually high level. A round, domed medallion floats at centre, built from concentric rings of small lobed cartouches and blossoms around a single green rosette, with a slim pendant finial reaching toward each end. Four heavy spandrels close the corners of the field in dark indigo, their inner edges drawn as a scalloped arch rather than a plain arc. Between medallion and spandrels the ivory field is filled edge to edge with an islimi vine system: thin curling stems, split palmettes, half palmettes and small five petal flowers that run continuously without ever repeating in an obvious grid. The main border carries a stately palmette and vine meander on ivory, flanked by narrow blue guard stripes and an outer gold stripe of scrolling leaf forms, and it is inside that gold stripe that the signature cartouche sits. At 500 knots per square inch the curved line stays true: the vines are drawn, not stepped, which is the whole point of a fine Nain.

Ivory, Blue and a Touch of Green

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to stark white, and it is the wool itself carrying that tone rather than a light dye. Against it the palette is almost entirely blue, but split across at least four distinct values: near black indigo for the spandrels, the medallion outline and the stem work, a mid denim blue for the guard stripes, a soft powder blue for petals and leaf tips, and a pale ice blue that reads almost as silver where the silk catches light. Warm accents keep it from going cold, with honey gold in the outer border stripe and small caramel and cocoa brown blossoms scattered through the vine work. A touch of green appears in the rosette at the dead centre of the medallion and in occasional leaf tips, and a few deep burgundy flower heads punctuate the border. The silk highlights sit on the pale blues and ivories, so the rug shifts noticeably as you walk around it, brighter from one end, deeper and more shadowed from the other.

Nain: Town, Workshop and Weave Quality

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and its weaving industry is young by Persian standards, built in the 20th century by weavers who took the Isfahan drawing tradition and made it their own in a cooler, more restrained palette. Fineness in Nain is counted in La, the number of plies twisted into each pile yarn: 9La is standard, 6La is fine, and 6La with silk outlining is the grade the best workshops reserve for their own signed pieces. This rug is 6La at approximately 500 knots per square inch, and the Habibian name in the border marks it as coming from the atelier most collectors regard as the top of the town. You can read the quality on the back as easily as the front, where the knot nodes are small, square and perfectly regular across the full 7' x 10'10", with no shift in tension from one end to the other. For anyone comparing pieces at this level, the 6La and Habibian Nain rugs guide explains exactly what separates the grades.