9'6" x 12'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Allover Ivory Boteh Paisley Field with Woven Birds | Fine Wool Pile

Most Kashans arrive with a big lobed medallion in the center. This one does not, and that is the reason to look at it. Across an ivory ground, rank after rank of paisley botehs climb the full 12'11" length, each one drawn separately, each one shaded differently, with slender flowering vines filling every gap between them. It is a quieter, more sophisticated piece of drawing than the standard medallion formula, and at 9'6" wide it covers a full room without a single heavy visual anchor to fight the furniture. The pile is fine wool at 3/8", the foundation cotton, and the condition is excellent with even pile from end to end. Among Persian Kashan rugs in the 10x13 room size, allover boteh examples in ivory turn up far less often than red medallion ones. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a true allover design: staggered rows of large botehs, the curled Persian paisley, each one hooked at the tip and filled with a different arrangement of blossoms, leaf sprays and tiny rosettes. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you will find small birds woven into the ground between the botehs, perched on the vine stems with tails trailing behind them, a detail that only shows up when you are standing over the rug. Smaller secondary botehs float between the main rows so the pattern never reads as a grid. The border system runs three bands deep: a wide ivory main border of scrolling acanthus leaves, split palmettes and mirrored paisleys, flanked by narrow guard stripes of running vine and by a fine barber pole outline that keeps the whole composition sharp. The drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with no straight geometric lines anywhere, which is exactly what separates city workshop weaving from village work.

A Warm Ivory Ground Worked in Red, Indigo and Soft Green

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to cream and undyed wool than to a cold white, and it holds light beautifully under the 3/8" pile. Against it the botehs are built in layered bands: deep madder red at the core, running out through brick and coral to rose pink at the edges, with indigo and mid blue lining the inner curls. Scattered through the field are cornflower blue rosettes with red centers, olive and sage green leaves, and small touches of saffron gold and apricot on the birds and bud stems. The main border repeats the same palette on its own ivory ground, so the rug reads as one continuous tone rather than a bright field inside a dark frame. There is no navy outer border to close it off, which is unusual for a Kashan and is what keeps a rug this large feeling light. In a room with pale walls the ivory carries the floor, while the red and blue give it enough weight to sit under dark wood.

Kashan: The Workshop City of Central Persia

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan on the edge of the desert, and its weaving goes back to the Safavid court workshops. The city built its reputation on soft, lustrous local wool and on disciplined workshop weaving, single knots pulled tight on a cotton foundation from a cartoon prepared by a designer rather than improvised at the loom. That discipline is what makes a field like this one possible: hundreds of botehs, none of them identical, all of them drawn to the same scale and spacing across nearly 13 feet. The reverse of this rug, shown with a ruler in the last photograph, is tight and clearly articulated, with the knot nodes legible and the pattern reading almost as crisply from the back as from the front. Kashan is also the rug most Americans have seen without knowing its name: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor.