8'2" x 12'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory All-Over Floral Field | Fine Wool Pile

Most Kashans you meet are red with a navy medallion. This one is the quieter, harder version of the town's work: an ivory ground carried edge to edge with an all-over floral vine, no medallion to hide behind, and every repeat drawn to line up across 12'11" of length. It measures 8'2" x 12'11", hand-knotted in Persia on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that still has its full body and a soft sheen where the light crosses it. The condition is excellent, the sides and ends are original, and the field reads clean and bright in person. Like all Persian Kashan rugs we import directly, it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a mirrored vine lattice: thin scrolling stems that split, curl back on themselves and carry lobed palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, serrated acanthus leaves and small blossoms in a repeat that reverses across the center axis in both directions. Look at the close-up photographs and you can follow one stem from a palmette through a leaf cluster into the next rosette without a break, which is the drawing discipline an all-over design demands. The surround is built in 7 bands. A wide taupe main border runs a rhythm of alternating palmettes and cupped blossoms on a continuous vine, framed on both sides by a narrow reciprocal stripe of ivory and blue, then by slim floral guard stripes and a fine outer meander. The corners resolve cleanly, with the border vine turning the angle rather than being cut off, which is a marker of a properly cartooned workshop piece.

The Ivory Ground and Its Blues

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to eggshell than to stark white, and because the wool takes light unevenly along the pile it shifts between cream and pale sand as you walk around it. Against that ground the drawing is led by 2 blues: a deep indigo navy that outlines the vines and fills the larger palmettes, and a soft powder blue that fills petals and leaf halves and keeps the whole field from going heavy. Olive green appears in the serrated leaves, camel and old gold in the smaller blossoms and in parts of the border vine, and there are pinpricks of rust and terracotta at flower centers that give the surface small warm sparks at close range. The main border sits in a smoky taupe-grey, a deliberately muted frame that lets the ivory field stay the brightest thing in the room. Overall the palette is cool, neutral and easy to live with, and it works over pale oak, dark walnut and stone alike.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving goes back to the Safavid court workshops. The town's reputation rests on 2 things: soft, lustrous local wool that holds dye and keeps a glow for decades, and a formal drawing tradition that treats a rug as an architectural composition rather than a village improvisation. That tradition is so familiar to American eyes that when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. This example is the harder end of the town's output, because an all-over field gives a weaver nowhere to reset: the knot count has to stay consistent across the full 8'2" width for the mirrored repeats to meet, and the ruler photograph shows the tight, even knotting that makes that possible. The cotton foundation is firm, the 3/8" pile is dense enough to take real traffic, and the rug lies flat and square, exactly what you want from a room size Kashan meant to be used rather than admired from a distance.