10'6" x 15'8" Persian Najafabad Rug | Isfahan Region Floral Medallion | Dense Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a genuinely big piece of classical city weaving: 10'6" x 15'8" of hand-knotted wool drawn in the Isfahan manner, woven in Najafabad just west of the city. The navy blue field carries a red and gold rosette medallion, ivory spandrels close the 4 corners, and a tomato red main border frames the whole composition between ivory guard stripes. The pile is a dense 3/8", the handle is heavy and substantial, and the wool has the quiet sheen you only get from good fleece and years of careful storage. At just over 164 square feet it belongs with the oversize Persian rugs that anchor a great room or a long formal dining table. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a layered rosette medallion: a red core ringed by gold and ivory petals, stepped outward in concentric bands and finished top and bottom with slender lobed pendants. Around it the field is filled edge to edge with a scrolling vine system, palmettes, lotus heads, curled cloud bands and serrated leaves that turn and overlap without ever repeating in an obvious grid. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, with the thin outline knots that keep each blossom legible against the dark ground. Ivory spandrels sit in the 4 corners, drawn with blue arabesque and cypress-like leaf forms so the eye reads a large oval reserve in the middle of the rug. The wide red main border alternates a big gold and teal palmette with paired blue leaf cartouches, and the narrow ivory guard borders on both sides run a small rosette and vine chain that ties the whole frame together. It is a formal, classical composition of the kind that has been woven around Isfahan since the Safavid workshops, and at this scale the pattern has room to breathe.

Navy Blue, Tomato Red and Ivory

The field is a deep navy blue that shifts toward indigo where the pile lies away from the light and toward a softer slate blue where it lies toward it. Against it, the palette is warm: a clear tomato red in the medallion and the main border, plenty of ivory and antique gold in the vinework and spandrels, and an old-gold outer guard stripe that reads almost wheat in daylight. Secondary tones do the detail work, including soft teal and seafoam green in the leaves, a light sky blue in the border arabesques, pale rose and dusty pink in the smaller blossoms, and touches of warm brown in the stems. The ivory selvage guard and the cream fringe keep the edges crisp. It is a blue-dominant rug with red as the counterweight, so it settles easily into rooms built on navy, cream, brass and walnut, and it holds its own against dark hardwood or a pale stone floor.

Najafabad and the Isfahan Weaving Tradition

Najafabad is a weaving town a short drive west of Isfahan in central Persia, and its looms work from the same cartoon tradition that made the city famous: curved line, flowing vine and precise floral drawing. Where the finest Isfahan workshop pieces push knot counts to the limit on small formats, Najafabad built its reputation on large-format room and palace sizes woven with a firmer, heavier hand, a cotton foundation and a dense wool pile that takes decades of traffic without flattening. You can see the workmanship on the back in the last photograph: tight, even rows, straight sides and clean color changes across a field this wide, which is the hard part of weaving anything over 15 feet long. If you want the background on the design vocabulary this rug draws from, our complete guide to Isfahan rugs covers the history, the drawing and how quality is judged.