9'10" x 13'2" Persian Nain Rug | Ivory Garden Panel Design | Wool & Silk, Never Used

At 9'10" x 13'2" this is a full room-size Persian Nain rug in the kheshti, or garden panel, drawing that the town is best known for outside its medallion work. The field is broken into a grid of interlocking ivory octagons, blush star panels and small trellis-filled tiles, held together by a pale blue strapwork lattice that runs unbroken from border to border. The pile is a fine 3/8" of wool with silk worked into the outlines and flower heads, so the drawing lifts slightly off the ground and changes tone as you walk around it. The rug is brand new, has never been on a floor, and ships with our certificate of authenticity. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this is the light, pastel end of the spectrum rather than the usual red and navy formula.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a repeating garden grid. Blush salmon 8 point star panels each hold a single flowering branch with small birds perched on it and scattered blue blossoms around the stem, and those stars sit inside larger ivory octagons filled with a dense scatter of curling leaves and tiny buds. Between them run small squares packed with a micro trellis of 4 petal rosettes, alternating madder red, light blue, camel and pale gold, so the field reads as a tiled courtyard seen from above. The pale blue strapwork that separates every compartment is punctuated with small diamond knots at each junction, and the whole grid repeats 6 panels deep by 3 panels across the width. The wide ivory main border carries its own rhythm of star cartouches in navy and brown, each one drawn with birds and flower sprays, linked by a continuous tile trellis and framed by narrow floral guard stripes. All 4 corners are properly resolved, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon followed carefully rather than a pattern squeezed to fit.

A Pastel Palette Built on White Ivory

White ivory is the governing color, used for the octagon compartments and for the main border ground, and it keeps a very large rug feeling light. Against it the weavers set a clear light blue for the lattice and for many of the small filled tiles, a blush salmon that shades toward antique rose in the star panels, and a deep madder red that appears only inside the small squares, where it works as punctuation rather than as a field color. Navy is reserved for the border cartouches and for the fine outlines that define each shape, soft sage and teal green appear in the leafwork, and camel and warm brown carry the border trellis. The silk sits in the flower heads, the bird bodies and the thinnest outlines, and it reads as a lighter, glassier version of whatever color surrounds it. The net effect is a rug that leans ivory, blue and rose from a standing height, with the red and navy only resolving into view when you look down closely.

Nain, Central Persia, and the Weave Itself

Nain sits on the western edge of the central Persian desert, roughly 100 miles east of Isfahan, and it is a comparative newcomer to rugs. The town wove fine wool cloth for cloaks until demand fell away in the 1930s, at which point its craftsmen turned their skill for fine handwork to knotting and took their drawing vocabulary from the Isfahan school next door. That inheritance is visible here in the curved strapwork, the precise floral filler and the balanced border, all of which only work at a high knot count on a tightly spun cotton foundation. Nain weave is graded by the La system, the number of threads twisted into each warp bundle, and the finer the bundle the finer the knot the weaver can tie. On this piece the wool pile is clipped low at 3/8", the silk outlining is cleanly separated from the wool around it, and the back shows the even, small, regular knotting that makes a Nain hold its drawing for generations.