9'10" x 12' Persian Kashan Rug | Plum Red Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition Wool Pile

This 9'10" x 12' rug is a city-woven floral piece built around a single lobed medallion set on a deep plum red field, and it carries the weight and handle you expect from a proper central Persian workshop. The 3/8" wool pile is full and even across the whole surface, dense enough for a busy formal room yet lustrous enough that the field shifts tone as you walk around it. At this scale it reads as a main-floor rug, large enough to hold a long dining table with chairs pulled out or a full seating group, which puts it squarely among the 9x12 Persian rugs most buyers are measuring for. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting the hand-knotted construction and the Persian Kashan design and origin.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Kashan formula, drawn with real discipline. A navy lobed medallion sits dead center, filled with an ivory 8 petal rosette and a small blue and red core, with serrated leaf forms and stepped navy outlines radiating out from it. Slender pendants extend above and below, and 4 corners carry navy spandrels drawn with the same vocabulary of palmettes, rosettes and curling split leaves. The field around the medallion is not left open: it is covered edge to edge with a fine allover vinery of palmettes, multi-petal rosettes, tulip heads and feathery leaves, every stem curving cleanly rather than breaking into angles. The border system runs to 5 bands, a wide navy main border of alternating palmettes and rosettes on a scrolling vine, flanked by narrow ivory and light blue guard stripes carrying small repeating blossoms, then a final thin outer stripe. The close-up of the corner shows how the drawing stays legible at the smallest scale, which is the real test of a curvilinear design like this one.

A Plum Red Field With Deep Navy Borders

The ground is a saturated plum red, a cool raspberry-leaning red rather than a brick or tomato tone, and it is the reason this piece sits so comfortably with both antique mahogany and modern upholstery. Against it the borders and medallion ground go deep indigo navy, nearly black where the pile lies away from the light, which gives the whole rug a strong frame. Inside that frame the palette opens up: ivory and cream do the outlining and carry the guard stripes, a mid sky blue and a brighter cobalt pick out individual blossom centers, olive and sage green fill the leaves, and soft peach and salmon pinks appear in the smaller flower heads along with touches of camel gold. Those lighter accents are what keep a dark, densely drawn rug from reading heavy. Shoppers working in this family of tones can see the rest of our red and burgundy Persian rugs for comparison, but very few of them hold a plum this clean.

Kashan Weaving in Central Persia

Kashan lies in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving tradition goes back to the Safavid court workshops, which is why the town's rugs are built on formal, drafted designs rather than remembered village patterns. Two things define the type: soft, lustrous local wool that takes dye with real depth, and the signature formula of a red field, a navy lobed medallion and ivory spandrels, exactly as it appears here. That combination has become the default picture of a Persian rug in American homes, to the point that when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Technically this piece shows the knot density Kashan work requires, fine enough on its cotton foundation to turn a curved vine without stair-stepping it, with the pile clipped low at 3/8" so the drawing stays sharp. The selvedges are tight, the fringe is intact and even, and the pile depth is consistent from end to end, all of which point to a rug that has been looked after rather than worked hard.