9'10" x 13'2" Persian Kashan Rug | Rose Red Floral Medallion | Signed & Never Used

This is the central Persian formula done properly: a rose red ground, a navy lobed medallion with ivory scrollwork at its heart, and ivory spandrels holding the 4 corners. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, the weave runs even from selvage to selvage, and the rug has never been laid on a floor. A small woven cartouche sits in the upper border, which tells you this came off a named workshop loom rather than an anonymous village one. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and at this footprint it sits with the room-size 10x13 Persian rugs that anchor a full seating group without crowding the walls.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a sky blue lozenge with a single rosette at its core, ringed by ivory arabesque scroll, then set into a navy lobed medallion that throws a pointed pendant toward each end of the rug. Around it the field never goes quiet: palmettes, small rosettes, curling serrated leaves and thin vine work fill every inch of the rose red ground in a mirrored layout that repeats top to bottom and side to side. The ivory spandrels carry the same vocabulary at larger scale, with blossoms and vine tips reaching in toward the medallion. The frame is built in layers, a broad dark navy main border of palmettes linked by vine, flanked on both sides by sky blue bands of rosette meander and separated by narrow ivory and red guard stripes. It is a busy drawing that still resolves, which is the test of good Kashan cartoon work.

The Rose Red and Navy Palette

Rose red is the dominant note, a clean cherry-toned red that warms toward burgundy in low light and brightens to crimson in daylight. Against it sits deep indigo navy in the medallion, the main border and the small floral heads scattered through the field, which is what gives the rug its depth from across a room. Ivory does the drawing work, outlining the medallion, the spandrels and every guard stripe so the pattern stays legible rather than muddy. The supporting colors are where the weaver's eye shows: sky blue in the secondary borders and in dozens of tiny blossoms, sage and olive green in the leaves, plus small touches of rose pink, gold and soft aubergine that appear only when you stand over the rug. The back, visible in the final photograph, shows the same clear color line for line, which is how you know the dyes went all the way through.

Kashan, Central Persia, and the Signed Loom

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that set the standard for the curved floral medallion. Local wool is soft and lustrous, which is why a Kashan takes light the way this one does, and the classic red field with navy medallion and ivory spandrels has been the town's signature for generations. It is also the most recognizable Persian design in America: the Shark Tank rug. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Among Persian Kashan rugs a woven cartouche is not decoration, it is the workshop putting its name on the piece, and it is usually reserved for weavings the shop considered worth claiming. Everything here supports that: tight even knotting on a cotton foundation, a 3/8" pile that has never been walked on, straight selvages and an original fringe that has never been rewoven.