9'5" x 12'7" Persian Kashmar Rug | Navy Vase and Peacock Field | 1980s Khorasan Weave

This 9'5" x 12'7" Kashmar was knotted in the 1980s in the Khorasan region of northeastern Persia, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. What sets it apart from the usual room-size Persian medallion piece is how much is happening inside the navy field: vases, flowering branches, and a pair of peacocks tucked into the ivory corners, all drawn at a scale you only notice once you are standing on it. The 3/8" fine wool pile is full and even from end to end, the selvages are tight, and the cotton fringe is clean and complete. At just under 10 by 13 feet it holds a full seating group with the front legs of the furniture on the rug, which places it squarely in the 10x13 Persian rugs range most living and dining rooms need.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a court garden pulled into a medallion format. A compact ivory lobed medallion sits at the center, outlined in olive and filled with a 4 petal rosette of rust red cartouches, each holding a pale gold blossom, with a single blue eye where the petals meet. Red arabesque tendrils and powder blue leaf forms spiral outward from it across the navy ground. Above and below the medallion the weaver set matched pairs of vessels: tall handled ewers banded with stylized script, footed bowls, and small urns, every one of them sprouting flowering branches and 8 point star flowers. The ivory spandrels carry the real character, with large boteh paisley forms, open peonies, and standing peacocks at the field corners turned in toward the center. Around all of it runs a rose red main border of lotus palmettes and rosettes linked by a thin vine, framed by powder blue guard stripes of reciprocal barbed motifs and a fine ivory meander at the outer edge, with a dark navy finish at the very border of the rug.

The Color Palette: Midnight Navy, Rose Red and Ivory

The field is a deep midnight navy that photographs almost black in the corners and opens up to a clear indigo under lamp light, the sort of ground that makes a piece read as one of the better navy blue Persian rugs in a warm room. Against it the reds do the work: a soft rose red in the main border, a warmer brick and terracotta tone in the medallion cartouches and the arabesques, and small touches of a deeper wine in the guard stripes. The ivory is not a flat white but a wheat cream that shifts slightly across the spandrels, which is the mark of hand-spun wool taking natural dye at different rates. Supporting colors are restrained and well chosen: powder blue in the leaf forms, vase bodies and guard bands, olive and moss green in the medallion outline and the peacock foliage, chocolate brown in the palmette shading, pale gold and apricot in the blossoms, and pinpricks of emerald green scattered through the field. Nothing shouts, and the overall impression from across the room is navy and red with an ivory frame.

Kashmar and the Weaving of Khorasan

Kashmar sits in Khorasan, the northeastern province of Persia, on the plain south of Mashad. The town built its name in the middle of the 20th century on large room-size weaving: cotton warp and weft, a dense double weft that keeps the rug flat and heavy, and the long-staple Khorasan wool that gives this pile its shine and its resistance to crushing. The drawing tradition comes from the same regional school as Persian Mashad rugs, which is why the curved arabesque and the palmette border here are handled with a workshop cartoon rather than village improvisation, while the pictorial peacocks and the vase groupings are a Kashmar signature. The back, shown in the last photograph, tells the story plainly: an even, tightly packed knot grid with the pattern fully legible from the reverse, and no repairs or reweaving anywhere across the 9'5" x 12'7" surface.