8'3" x 11'8" Persian Nain Rug | Navy Blue Star Medallion in Wool & Silk | Recent, Never Used

At 8'3" x 11'8" this is a full room piece, one of the sizes people reach for when they want a seating group to sit entirely on the rug, and it belongs to the family of large Persian rugs that anchor a room rather than float in it. The pile is wool and silk: wool carries the body of the drawing, silk is used for the outlines and highlights, which is why the vine work and the center of the medallion change brightness as you walk around the rug. It is a recent weave that was never put on a floor, so the pile stands at full height, the ivory has not yellowed and the navy is even from end to end. Like all Nain rugs we sell, it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is organized around a 16 point ivory star medallion. Its inner core drops back into navy scrollwork and closes on a single small rosette in tan and pale blue at the exact center of the rug, which is the point the whole drawing is measured from. Directly above and below the medallion sit matching pendant panels filled with boteh forms and small blossoms. From there the navy ground opens into a mirrored arabesque: heavy split leaf forms curling back on themselves, thread fine ivory vine tendrils, palmettes and 8 petal rosettes arranged so the left half answers the right half almost knot for knot. The 4 corners of the field are lifted by ivory spandrels that dissolve into the border, and the main border walks a slow line of palmettes and lotus blossoms joined by a scrolling stem, fenced on both sides by light blue guard stripes and finished with a narrow reciprocal outer band.

Navy Blue Field, Ivory Drawing and Light Blue Shading

The field is a deep navy that reads nearly blue black where the pile leans away from the light, and that darkness is what makes this one of the more dramatic navy blue Persian rugs in this size. Against it the vine work is drawn in clean ivory, with the silk outlines throwing a faint sheen along every stem. The border ground shifts to a warmer beige, almost a soft camel in the corner photo, which keeps the perimeter from competing with the field. Light blue does the shading work in at least 3 values, from a pale chalky tone inside the medallion petals to a stronger sky blue in the guard stripes and flower heads. Scattered through the border and the medallion are small accents of burgundy and a soft tan brown, used sparingly on rosette centers and leaf tips, and those warm dots are what stop a navy and ivory rug from reading cold in a room.

Nain, Central Persia, and the Quality of the Weave

Nain is a small town on the edge of the central Persian desert, roughly 90 miles east of Isfahan. It spent centuries weaving fine wool cloth and only turned to rugs in the 1930s, which is why Nain work looks nothing like village weaving: the town borrowed the Isfahan drawing tradition, the curved line, the flowing vine, the strict symmetry, and executed it on a tight cotton foundation with a very short clipped pile. The grading system is the La count, the number of threads twisted into each warp, and a lower La number means a finer, denser rug. What you can see on this piece without any grading talk is the evidence itself: the vine tendrils are a single knot wide in places, the silk outlines hold a crisp edge against the navy, and the back shows a small, regular knot that lets the design stay this detailed at 8'3" x 11'8".