Qom Rugs

Qom is the youngest of the great Persian weaving names. The city wove almost nothing before the 1930s, and when it started it aimed directly at the top of the market rather than working its way up. The result is a tradition with no coarse end: Qom rugs are fine, formal and expensive, and a large proportion of them are silk.

Designs are drawn, not remembered. Dense floral grounds, medallion and corner compositions, hunting scenes, and pictorial panels taken from miniature painting. The fields are typically filled edge to edge, because at a Qom knot count there is no reason to leave space. Pure silk pieces are often woven on a silk foundation, which is what lets the drawing stay crisp at that scale.

Silk also gives Qom rugs their most distinctive quality: they change colour as you move. The pile lies in one direction, so a silk Qom reads deep and saturated from one end of a room and pale and luminous from the other. It is the reason these rugs are as often hung on a wall as laid on a floor, and the reason master weavers sign them in a cartouche in the border.