8'2" x 8'4" Round Persian Nain Rug | Ivory Field, Blue Floral Medallion | Wool and Silk, Never Used

A true round rug of this diameter is uncommon, because weaving a circle on a loom built for straight lines means recalculating the knot count on every single row. This 8'2" x 8'4" piece is a workshop-grade Persian Nain, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation in fine wool with silk used to outline the flowers and vines, so the drawing catches light as you walk around it. The pile is short and tightly packed, the ivory ground is even from edge to edge, and the concentric borders track the curve without a single wobble. It has never been on a floor: the wool still has its original bloom and the fringe is untouched. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

At the center sits a small 8 petal rosette with a deep red eye, set on a pale blush ground and framed by a cusped cartouche of cloud-band scrollwork. Radiating out from it is a ring of heart shaped palmettes, each one filled with its own miniature bouquet, then a second ring of lobed leaf forms that turns the whole medallion into a stylized sunburst roughly 3 feet across. The surrounding field is not left empty: it carries an all-over lattice of thin curling vines, rosettes, lanceolate leaves and small buds, drawn small enough that the pattern reads as texture from standing height and as individual flowers when you kneel. Four concentric bands finish the rug, a narrow blossom-and-vine guard, a floral band, the wide main border with its alternating palmette and reversed-S vine, and a final outer guard before the plain selvage and fringe.

A Study in Ivory, Sky Blue and Camel

The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to stark white, which is what keeps this Nain from feeling cold in a room with grey floors. Against it the palette is almost entirely blue: pale sky blue for the vine tracery, a clearer cornflower blue for the small blossom accents, and near-black navy for every outline, which is what gives the drawing its crispness. The main border shifts to a soft camel and sand, a quiet band of warmth that separates the field from the blue-green outer guard. Inside the medallion the ground warms again to a pale blush, and scattered through the flowers are pinpoints of burgundy and cocoa brown, tiny but deliberate, keeping the cool scheme from going flat. The silk highlights sit mostly in the white and palest blue passages, so those lines look lit from within as the angle changes.

Nain: Central Persia's Finest Ivory Weave

Nain is a desert town in central Persia, east of Isfahan, where the looms were turned from fine woolen cloak weaving to rug weaving in the 1930s. That textile background explains everything about the type: extremely fine yarn, a short clipped pile, silk reserved for outlining rather than for whole fields, and an ivory and blue palette that has become the town's signature worldwide. Nain weavers work in the La system, counting the plies in each warp thread, and the town's reputation rests on the same thing Isfahan's does, the precision of the curved line. You can see it here in the unbroken sweep of the border vine as it travels a full circle. Wool and silk together, on a round format that demands constant recalculation from the weaver, put this piece in the upper tier of wool and silk Persian rugs we carry in the round shape.