9'7" x 13'4" Persian Nain Rug | Midnight Blue Oval Field | 6La Wool and Silk, 500 KPSI

A large oval of midnight blue set inside a deep ivory surround is the whole idea of this piece, and at 9'7" x 13'4" it has the floor space to let that idea breathe. This Persian Nain rug was hand-knotted in the 2000's at roughly 500 knots per square inch, in wool with silk worked through the outlines and flower centers, on a cotton foundation. The pile is full and unwalked, the fringes are original and untouched, and the colors have never seen sun. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records origin, materials, knot count and measurements.

Design and Motifs

Instead of a closed medallion, the weaver drew one enormous oval and filled it with a continuous Shah Abbasi vine: hooked palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, split leaves and small lotus heads all connected by a thread-fine tendril that never breaks. The drawing is mirrored on both axes, so each half of the oval answers the other without becoming mechanical. Outside the oval the ivory ground carries a slower, more open floral scroll with cypress-like leaf sprays, small vases and four corner clusters that turn the spandrel area into a garden in its own right. The main border repeats a palmette and vine sequence broken by paisley cartouches, and it is flanked by narrow guard stripes of running blue vine and by panels of tiny navy lattice dots, a hallmark of careful Nain drafting. The fineness of the knot is what makes this level of detail legible: a single flower head in the field is built from 6 or 7 separate colors.

Color: Midnight Blue Against Ivory and Camel

The field is a true midnight blue, so dark that it reads almost black in the corners of the oval and opens to inky navy where the light catches the silk. Against it sit ivory and soft white vines, camel brown and warm apricot palmettes, and pale sky blue flower centers that lift the whole field. The surround is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, with a faint oatmeal tone in the open ground that keeps it from looking cold next to the navy. Small deep red accents appear inside the blossoms and in the border cartouches, and are easiest to see in the close-up photographs. Silk is used selectively rather than everywhere, so the highlights shift as you move around the rug while the wool ground stays matte and calm. It is a cool, formal palette that sits well with navy, grey, walnut and brass, and it suits rooms in the 10x13 Persian rug range where a large seating group needs one unifying color.

Nain: The Town and the Weave

Nain sits on the desert edge east of Isfahan, and its weaving tradition grew directly out of the Isfahan workshops, which is why the curved line here is so confident. The town's reputation rests on fineness and on the La system, which counts the plies in the warp: the fewer the plies, the finer the weave, and Nain 6La weaving is the grade collectors look for. At approximately 500 knots per square inch across nearly 128 square feet, this is an enormous amount of hand work, several weavers on one loom over a period of years, following a cartoon drawn by a master designer. The clipping is low and even, the selvedges are tight, and the back is regular enough that the design reads clearly from the reverse, which is the honest test of a fine Nain.