9'9" x 14'4" Persian Kashan Rug | Classic Red Floral Medallion | Room Size | Excellent Condition

At 9'9" x 14'4" this is a full room size Persian Kashan rug, the format most buyers are shopping when they search the 10x14 Persian rugs class. It is hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile, heavy enough to lie dead flat under a dining table or a long sofa without a pad fighting it. The drawing is the textbook Kashan formula handled properly: a tomato red field packed edge to edge with vine scroll, a lobed ivory and sky blue medallion on the centre line, ivory spandrels in all 4 corners and a deep navy main border. Condition is excellent, with full even pile and clean ivory fringe at both ends as shown in the detail photographs. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous arabesque: thin curling vines carrying palmettes, serrated leaves and small 8 petal rosettes, mirrored across both axes so the eye keeps finding the same blossom twice. At the centre sits a stepped, lobed medallion with an ivory ground, and inside it a sky blue cartouche holding a single red and gold rosette, finished at each end with a slim pendant. The 4 corner spandrels repeat that ivory ground with their own cluster of palmettes and curling leaves, which is what gives the field its clean oval shape without any outline drawn around it. Border work runs 5 bands deep: a navy main border of alternating palmettes and rosette vines, flanked by a light blue floral stripe, an ivory and gold guard stripe, and a fine meander on the outermost edge, the sequence visible in the corner close-up. The reciprocal drawing in the guard stripes stays unbroken right through the corner turns, which is the detail that separates a real city weave from a copy.

A Palette Built on Tomato Red, Ivory and Navy

The field reads as a warm tomato red, brighter under direct light and settling into a deeper brick tone in the showroom photographs, with the lustrous wool throwing two slightly different values of the same dye as you walk around it. Against that red, ivory does the structural work: it carries the medallion, the spandrels and the guard stripes, so the layout stays legible from across a room. Blue appears in two distinct registers, a soft powder blue inside the medallion and the inner border stripe, and a deep inky navy in the main border and the corner grounds, and that contrast is what makes the border frame the field rather than crowd it. Scattered through the vine work are small notes of apricot, soft gold, rose pink and a muted sage green on leaves and stems, visible in the medallion close-up. The overall effect belongs with other red and burgundy Persian rugs, warm and formal, and it sits comfortably with mahogany, walnut, brass and cream walls.

Kashan: The Weaving City Behind This Rug

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that set the standard for curved line floral drawing. The city works with soft, lustrous local wool and keeps returning to one formula, a red field, a navy or ivory lobed medallion and ivory spandrels, because the formula is good enough to carry 4 centuries of repetition. Kashan is also the Persian rug most Americans have already seen without naming it: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Weaving quality here is city workshop quality rather than village work, which shows in this piece as straight side selvedges, square corners, fine symmetrical knotting on a cotton warp and a clipped 3/8" pile that holds crisp motif outlines, all of which you can read in the back and fringe photograph. That combination of tough wool and tight city knotting is why a Kashan of this size takes decades of traffic and still presents like this one.