9'9" x 14'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Floral Field with Navy Medallion | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

This is a room-filling semi-antique piece from the classical group of Persian Kashan rugs, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and measuring 9'9" x 14'11". The drawing is the formula collectors buy Kashan for: a rose red field packed with curling vine and flowerheads, a navy lobed medallion at the center, ivory spandrels in the 4 corners and a wide navy main border. The pile stands at a full 3/8" with no low spots, the sides and ends are original and the white fringe is clean, which is why it grades excellent rather than merely good for its age. At almost 15 feet long it belongs with the oversize Persian rugs that can carry a large seating group or a long dining table without the furniture crowding the border. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center is an 8 lobed navy medallion with a stepped ivory core, and inside that core sits a small turquoise star rosette ringed by pink and coral petals. Slender navy pendants run off the medallion toward each end, finishing in palmette finials. Around all of it the field is a continuous all over scroll: hooked vine tendrils, serrated leaves, split palmettes and small ivory and sky blue blossoms, drawn loosely enough that the red ground still reads as open space rather than clutter. The 4 corner spandrels are ivory and filled with the same vine vocabulary in miniature, which pulls the eye back to the medallion. The main border is navy and runs an alternating palmette and rosette chain linked by a thin ivory vine, flanked on both sides by light blue guard stripes of small repeating flowerheads and a narrow ivory reciprocal band at the outer edge. Close up, as in the medallion and corner photographs, you can see the outlining is done in a single row of ivory knots, the detail that keeps each flower distinct at this scale.

Color: Rose Red, Navy, Ivory and Green

The field is a deep rose red, warmer and slightly raspberry in the close-up photographs and a touch cooler and more brick toned in the full floor views, with the gentle tonal movement across the width that hand-spun wool and natural dyeing give. Against it, the medallion and main border are a very dark inky navy that reads near black at a distance and opens into true blue where the light hits the pile. The third color is ivory, used for the medallion core, the corner spandrels, the flower outlines and the outer reciprocal band, and it is a soft cream rather than a bleached white. The accents are where this Kashan gets its life: turquoise and sky blue in the guard stripes and leaf tips, olive and moss green in the serrated leaves, apricot and old rose in the palmettes, and small touches of gold and camel in the border rosettes. Overall the rug sits firmly in the red and burgundy family with strong navy and cool blue relief, which is why it works over pale oak, wide plank floors and against ivory or grey walls.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its workshops trace their drawing directly back to the Safavid court tradition of the 16th century. The town is known for soft, lustrous local wool and for that unmistakable formula of red field, navy lobed medallion and ivory spandrels, the pattern most people picture when they picture a Persian rug. It is also the Shark Tank rug: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Weaving is done on a cotton warp and weft with a symmetrical knot and a tightly packed weft, which is what lets a piece this size stay square and lie flat. The back photograph shows a fine, even, clearly hand-knotted grid with no machine regularity, and the 3/8" pile height tells you this was woven for long floor life rather than for show. A rug of 9'9" x 14'11" in this quality represents months of loom time for a team of weavers, and the fact that the pile is still full and the colors still deep is the best argument for its condition grade.