9'6" x 16'5" Persian Kashan Rug | Signed Oversize Medallion | Red Field, Navy Spandrels

This is a signed Persian Kashan rug woven at true room-filling scale, 9'6" x 16'5", with a cotton foundation and a full 3/8" wool pile that still sits even from selvedge to selvedge. The weaver put a small woven cartouche into the end border, which on a Kashan of this length almost always means a workshop piece rather than a village commission. The proportions are what make it useful: nearly 16 and a half feet of length under a long dining table or down the length of an open living space, which is the practical reason buyers come looking for oversize Persian rugs in the first place. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kashan formula and follows it well. A navy lobed medallion sits dead center, filled with an ivory cartouche-shaped core and a single light blue 8 petal rosette at its heart, then ringed by hooked navy brackets and small palmettes. Above and below it, two navy pendants reach out along the long axis, and the 4 corners carry deep navy spandrels drawn with the same vocabulary so the field reads as one continuous garden interrupted by the medallion rather than divided by it. The red ground between them is packed with curling vine, serrated leaves, rosettes, tulip forms and multi-lobed palmettes, all drawn on a curvilinear line that needs a fine knot to hold its shape at this size. The main border is a navy floral meander with alternating rose and ivory blossoms, framed on both sides by narrow reciprocal guard stripes in light blue and ivory, and it is in one of those stripes that the signature cartouche appears.

A Deep Madder Red Field Against Navy and Ivory

The field is a deep madder red, slightly cool rather than orange, and it holds a soft vertical abrash in the close-up photographs that tells you the yarn was dyed in batches. Against it, the medallion and spandrels go almost black-navy in the shade and open up to ink blue in direct light. The ivory in the medallion center and the guard stripes is a warm cream, not a bleached white, and it does the work of separating the two heavy darks. Inside the floral work you get the full Kashan palette in small doses: powder and cornflower blue on the leaves and rosette centers, dusty rose and salmon pink on the blossoms, olive green on the stems, and old gold and camel picking out palmette outlines and the thin lines that edge each border. The overall impression from across a room is red and navy, formal and quiet, with the lighter blues and creams only revealing themselves when you stand over it.

Kashan: Central Persia and the Weave Behind It

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weavers inherited the Safavid court workshop tradition along with unusually soft, lustrous local wool. The red field, navy lobed medallion and ivory-accented spandrels seen here are the town's signature formula, and it is so embedded in how Americans picture a Persian rug that when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. What separates a good Kashan from an ordinary one is whether the knot count can carry the curved line, and the back of this piece shows tight, regular rows on a cotton warp with no looseness at the joins, which is how a weaver keeps a 16'5" length square from end to end. The 3/8" wool pile has the density Kashan is known for, so foot traffic compresses it rather than splaying it, and the colors sit slightly deeper where the pile leans.