9'8" x 13'2" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Floral Field, Navy Medallion | 1980s, Excellent Condition

This is a classic room-size Persian Kashan rug from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still in excellent, essentially perfect condition. At 9'8" x 13'2" it is a true formal size, the proportion that was woven for a dining table with chairs pulled out or a full seating group, and it sits squarely in the most searched-for bracket of 10x13 Persian rugs. The pile is clean and even edge to edge, the ivory cotton fringe is intact, and the selvedges are tight, as the corner and rolled-edge photos show. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity stating origin, materials and hand-knotted construction. If you have watched Shark Tank, there is a Persian Kashan on the floor, and this is that rug in its most traditional dress.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the textbook Kashan formula, executed with real control. A navy lobed medallion sits dead center, stepped and pointed at both ends, with an ivory inner cartouche and a sky blue 8 petal rosette core at the very middle. Four navy spandrels anchor the corners, each filled with ivory palmettes and curling vine, so the red field reads as a lobed oval floating inside the composition. Across that field runs an all over flowering vine: serrated palmettes, carnations, rosettes and small blossoms on thin scrolling stems, mirrored precisely top to bottom and left to right. The triple border system does the framing, a wide navy main border carrying large ivory and red rosettes linked by vine, flanked by light blue and ivory guard stripes with their own repeating flowerheads, then a fine outer meander. The close-up photos show how tightly the curved lines are held, which is what separates a workshop Kashan from a village copy of the same pattern.

A Palette of Deep Red, Navy and Ivory

The field is a deep true red with a slight cherry warmth to it, the kind of red that looks saturated under lamplight and settles into a softer rose where the pile catches daylight, as you can see in the angled photos. Against it, the main border and medallion are a dark inky navy, almost black in the shadowed shots, which gives the rug its strong graphic frame. The relief comes from two blues used deliberately: a mid sky blue that fills the inner guard border and the medallion core, and a paler powder blue scattered through the field blossoms. Ivory does the outlining work throughout, in the spandrels, the rosette petals and the guard stripes, and it keeps the dark colors from closing in. Accents of olive and leaf green appear in the leaves and vine tips, with warm gold and ochre in the smaller palmettes and a touch of coral pink in the flowerheads. It is a red and navy room anchor that will carry wood tones, brass, cream walls and dark upholstery without argument.

Kashan Weaving and Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving tradition runs straight back to the Safavid court workshops. The town built its name on soft lustrous local wool and on one formula it never needed to improve: a red field, a navy lobed medallion, ivory spandrels and a curvilinear floral vine drawn with workshop precision. This piece is a good representative of the 1980s production, woven in wool on a cotton foundation at a knot count fine enough to hold the curved stems and the small mirrored blossoms clearly, with a medium pile that has worn evenly and kept its sheen. The back photos show a regular, disciplined knot line with no bowing, and the leather-bound end and intact fringe tell you it was handled and stored properly rather than used hard. For anyone learning to read a piece like this, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here.