8'4" x 11'8" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory Floral Medallion Field | Signed by the Weaver

This is the quiet, light version of the Kashan formula, and it is the harder one to weave. Instead of the usual deep red ground, the field here is an open ivory that leaves nowhere to hide a sloppy line, and the drawing holds up: a soft brown beige medallion floating in a sea of thin navy vine work, with the weaver's own cartouche signed into the border. It measures 8'4" x 11'8", so it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat table with margin, and the 3/8" wool pile still has body and sheen in the photographs. Among Persian Kashan rugs the signed ivory ground pieces are the ones collectors chase, and this one is in excellent condition throughout. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center carries a lobed, pointed medallion on a brown beige ground, outlined twice in navy and finished at top and bottom with slender pendant finials that reach into the field. At its heart sits an olive gold 8 petal rosette ringed by small ivory palmettes and curling cloud bands, the kind of concentric layering that only reads clearly when the knot count is high enough to turn a curve without a stair-step. Around the medallion the ivory field is filled with a continuous arabesque: split leaf vines, flowering palmettes, feathery sprays and tiny blossoms, each stem drawn in a single thin line rather than a thick band. The 4 corners carry matching beige spandrels with the same vine vocabulary, which frames the field without closing it in. The border system runs wide and formal, a main band of linked palmettes and meandering vine flanked by several narrow guard stripes of running flowerheads, and in one of those bands the weaver set a cartouche of woven script, a signature in navy on ivory that marks this as workshop rather than village work.

A Study in Ivory, Brown Beige and Navy Blue

The palette is deliberately low contrast and very easy to live with. The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and it shifts slightly with the light because the wool takes sheen. Over it the drawing is worked in navy blue, used as the outline color throughout, so the pattern reads as fine dark linework rather than blocks of color. The medallion, spandrels and main border share a soft brown beige that sits somewhere between taupe and camel and gives the rug its overall sand tone. Inside that structure the weaver dropped in accents sparingly: pale sky blue flowerheads that lift the whole surface, olive and antique gold leaves, a deep walnut brown in the border vines, and the occasional pinprick of rose red and coral at the center of a blossom. Those tiny warm dots are what keep an ivory rug from going flat. If you are shopping the whole range of ivory and beige Persian rugs, this one leans warm and golden rather than grey, which makes it forgiving against oak floors, cream plaster and walnut furniture.

Kashan: Central Persia's Workshop City

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan on the edge of the desert, and it has been a weaving town since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. That inheritance shows in the discipline of a piece like this: a symmetrical cartoon drawn by a designer, a cotton foundation under tension, double wefting between rows, and soft lustrous local wool clipped to a medium 3/8" pile that holds the detail of the vine work without blurring it. The weave on the reverse is tight and even edge to edge, with the knot rows running straight, which is why a well kept Kashan of this generation is still flat and supple decades on. It is also the Persian rug most Americans have already seen without naming it: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The signature cartouche is the detail that separates this rug from the commercial run, since a weaver only signs work they expect to be judged on, and the open ivory ground is the hardest field to sign your name to.