9'6" x 13'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Pistachio Green All-Over Floral | Signed Cartouche

Most Persian Kashan rugs arrive on a deep madder red ground, which is exactly what makes this one worth stopping for: the field is a pale pistachio green, and the entire drawing is built in blues, olive and camel on top of it. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, with a 3/8" pile that still stands up cleanly across all 133 square feet, and the upper border carries a woven signature cartouche, the mark of a named workshop rather than an anonymous commercial run. At 9'6" x 13'11" it sits squarely in the 10x14 Persian rugs class, the size that anchors a full living room with furniture legs on. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The weaver ran an all-over floral design from selvage to selvage, a lattice of thin curving vines carrying lobed palmettes, serrated saz leaves, 8 petal rosettes and small star flowers, each element mirrored across the long axis so the two halves answer each other precisely. The close-up shows how disciplined the drawing is: every palmette is outlined in navy, filled in sky blue and stopped with a tiny white or yellow heart, and the leaf tips finish in a single knot of teal. Because the pattern repeats rather than radiating from one point, the rug reads the same from any chair in the room, which is the practical argument for an all-over layout at this size. The border system is a triple arrangement, a wide ivory main band of connected palmettes and vine flanked by slate blue guard stripes, with a further narrow floral meander at the outer edge. The signature cartouche is set into the upper border, worked in navy on ivory above a second small panel, framed by turquoise flowerheads.

The Pistachio Green Palette

The field colour is the whole point of this piece. It is a pistachio green, a pale cool green with just enough ivory in it to behave like a neutral, and it shifts noticeably with the light: warmer and creamier under lamplight, cooler and closer to celadon under daylight. Against that ground the weaver stacked a full range of blues, from a chalky sky blue in the flower petals through cornflower in the vine work down to near-black indigo in the palmette outlines and the darkest rosette centres. Olive green and a soft camel brown do the work of the leaves and stems, warming the whole surface so it never tips cold, and small hits of turquoise and old rose appear at the flower hearts, visible only when you are standing over it. The border reverses the balance, putting a light ivory ground under the same blue and brown vocabulary with a lavender-grey cast in the guard stripes. For a room with oatmeal, taupe, pale wood or brushed nickel, this is a far easier Kashan to live with than a red one.

Kashan and the Quality of the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its workshops trace their line back to the Safavid court ateliers of the 16th and 17th centuries. The city's advantage has always been its wool, soft and lustrous, which is why a Kashan pile picks up light the way this one does and why the colour sits so evenly. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor, which tells you how completely this one city came to define what most people picture when they hear the words Persian rug. The back, shown here against a ruler, is tight and regular, every knot node clearly legible, the pattern as readable from behind as from the front, which is the fastest honest test of a hand-knotted city weave. A signed cartouche in the border means a workshop piece rather than a village commission, and workshops sign because they expect the rug to outlive them. In excellent condition, with full even pile and clean flat edges, this one has plenty of that life left.