8'7" x 12'4" Persian Kashan Rug | Antiqued Rust & Blue Floral Medallion | 1980's Wool

This 8'7" x 12'4" room size piece is a 1980's Kashan that has been given an antiqued wash, the treatment that pulls the reds down into wine and lifts the vine work into copper and apricot. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, cut low enough that the drawing stays crisp across the whole 103" by 148" surface, and heavy enough underfoot to sit flat without slipping. Collectors who follow Persian Kashan rugs will recognise the formula immediately: one medallion, four answering corners, and a field that never repeats itself twice in the same way. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

A lobed central medallion anchors the field, drawn in dark indigo with a gold cartouche outline and a small rosette at its exact center, finished top and bottom with slender pendants. Around it the ground is filled edge to edge with curling leaves, split palmettes, budding stems and 8 petal rosettes, all worked in a continuous vine rather than a repeating grid, so no two quarters of the field read the same. The 4 corners carry matching spandrels in the same deep indigo, which frames the medallion and gives the eye a clean resting point. The main border runs a wide band of paired palmettes and rosettes, flanked by 3 narrower guard stripes of running vine and small blossoms on each side, the outermost one edged in a pale gold that holds the whole composition together.

Rust, Blue and Gold Under an Antiqued Wash

The field reads as a deep rust red that shifts toward wine in the shaded areas and toward brick and terracotta where the light hits the pile directly, which is exactly what the antiqued wash is meant to do. Against it, the blues are not bright navy but a smoky teal, almost a bottle green in the leaf work of the border, and they cool the red enough to keep it from feeling heavy. Gold does the connecting: a soft apricot gold in the vines, a brighter marigold in the medallion cartouche and the outer guard stripe, and a warm copper in the spandrel scrollwork. The fringe is a pale blush, and the selvedge is a darker burgundy. Seen from a low angle the pile shows the natural luster of the wool, and the color changes slightly with the nap direction, deeper from one end, brighter from the other.

Kashan: The Weaving Town and the Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms carry the Safavid court workshop tradition forward: soft lustrous local wool, disciplined curved line, and the classic medallion and spandrel layout that most people picture when they picture a Persian rug. It is the rug you see on the floor when you watch Shark Tank. The back of this piece shows an even, tightly packed knot line with no bulges or pulled rows, the mark of a town weaver working to a proper cartoon rather than from memory. At 8'7" x 12'4" it belongs with the 9x12 Persian rugs that anchor a full seating group, and its 1980's weave puts it at the age where the wool has settled and the wash has matured. If you want to understand how weavers, wool and wear patterns are read together, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug covers the same markers we used here.