9' x 12' Persian Qum Rug | All Over Boteh Paisley | Fine Silk Pile | Early 2000s, Never Used

A quiet, disciplined piece in a true room-filling 9' x 12' format: hundreds of small boteh paisleys marching across an ivory ground, drawn in teal, sage and navy with pinpoint rust accents. The silk pile is clipped low, about 1/4", which is exactly why the outlines stay crisp and the surface catches light differently as you walk around it. Woven in the early 2000s and never put on a floor, the rug is in perfect condition with full pile, straight sides and clean ivory fringe, as shown in the reverse photograph. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is 100% hand-knotted in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The field is a strict all over boteh design, the curled paisley that Persian weavers call boteh jegheh, repeated in offset rows with every teardrop leaning the same direction. Each boteh is outlined twice, filled with a pale interior and a tiny ladder of stitches up the spine, and the gaps between them carry small 6 and 8 petal rosettes, thin curling vine tendrils and single dark florets. There is no medallion and no open ground, so the whole 9' x 12' surface reads as texture rather than as one central statement, which is why a rug like this sits so easily under furniture. The border system is layered: a narrow outer stripe of repeating leaf buds, a wider band of larger paisleys set upright and facing inward, a floral meander guard stripe, and a fine teal outline framing the field. The corners are resolved cleanly, with the border paisleys turning rather than being cut off, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon rather than a copied one.

A Light Ivory Ground With Teal, Sage and Rust

The ground is an ivory cream that warms into soft beige and faint oatmeal across the width, the natural tonal movement you get from hand-dyed silk rather than a flat printed surface. Against it, the botehs are drawn in a deep teal that reads close to spruce green in the shade and brightens to blue-green in direct light, with the inner cartouche of each paisley filled in a paler seafoam and the finest outlines in near-black navy. Scattered through the field are small accents of rust brown, terracotta and warm gold ochre, used sparingly, perhaps a dozen specks per repeat, which is what keeps the palette from going cold. The borders hold the same ivory ground with teal paisleys and ochre and brick detailing, separated by thin green-blue stripes, and the pile ends in untouched ivory fringe. Overall it is a light, calm rug that leans green and blue over a cream base, easy with warm wood floors and with beige and ivory rugs already in a room.

Qum Origin and Weaving Quality

Qum sits south of Tehran and is the youngest of the great Persian weaving cities, with serious production only beginning in the 20th century, yet it climbed straight to the top because its workshops compete directly against each other and refuse to work in anything but the finest silk. Persian Qum rugs are known for exactly what you see here: miniature motifs held in perfect register over a very large field, a low clipped pile so no detail is lost in the fiber, and a sheen that shifts with the viewing angle. Weaving a boteh repeat at this scale is harder than it looks, because any drift in the knot count shows immediately as a wandering row, and across 12 feet of length these rows stay true. If you want the background on how the fiber behaves and how to care for it, our guide to Persian silk rugs covers it, and the cotton foundation here gives the piece the stability a large format needs.