14' x 25'6" Persian Nain Rug | Navy and Ivory Wool and Silk Floral Medallion | 1990s Palace Size, Approx. 400 KPSI

At 14' x 25'6" this Nain is a palace format, one of the few sizes a workshop will only take on with a standing order and a loom built for it, and it has come through from the 1990s with the pile still full and even from one end to the other. The field is deep navy, the medallion is drawn in pale sky blue and ivory, and the wide main border runs beige framed by soft terracotta guard stripes. Wool and silk are knotted together on a cotton foundation, the silk placed where the drawing needs to catch light, which is the difference between a serious Nain and a market one. Among oversize Persian rugs a piece this long in this quality is genuinely scarce, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Nain formula handled at full scale. A lobed star medallion sits dead center on the long axis, its pale blue ground packed with tiny palmettes and ivory cartouches and closing on a small rosette at the exact middle. From the medallion the pattern opens outward into a navy field carried entirely by thin ivory vine scrolls, with Shah Abbasi palmettes, split leaves and rosettes hung along them so that no two adjacent blossoms repeat in the same color. The 4 corner spandrels are worked in beige with the same vocabulary reversed, a trick that makes the navy field read as an oval even though it is squared. The main border holds alternating large palmettes and pendant lotus blooms against beige, flanked on both sides by terracotta guard bands of turtle palmettes and a narrow blue outer stripe that runs the full 25'6" without a break in the rhythm.

A Deep Navy Field Against Beige and Terracotta

The ground is a true midnight navy, dense enough that from a standing position it reads almost black, then opens up under light into indigo with the silk-outlined vines glowing against it. That contrast is what makes the rug work in a large room: the field grounds the space while the beige and camel border lifts the edges. The medallion is a soft sky blue, several shades lighter than the field and carrying ivory, cream and a warm sand tone through its interior. Terracotta, closer to salmon than to rust, appears only in the guard borders and in small flower centers, and it is what keeps the palette warm rather than cold. Buyers shopping navy blue Persian rugs at this size will notice how evenly the dye holds across 25'6", with no abrash banding, which on a piece this long means dye lots were mixed properly before a single knot was tied.

Nain: the Weaving Town and the Weave Itself

Nain is a small town on the western edge of the central desert, a short run east of Isfahan, and it only turned to rug weaving in the 1930s when its fine wool cloth trade collapsed. The weavers borrowed the Isfahan drawing tradition, the curved line and the flowing vine, and then pushed the knot count to carry it. Persian Nain rugs are graded by the La system, the number of threads twisted into each warp, and the finer the La the more knots fit across a given width. At roughly 400 knots per square inch this piece sits in the range where the silk outlines stay crisp rather than blurring into the wool, visible in the close photographs where a single silk line separates a blue petal from a brown one. The pile is clipped low, the handle is smooth and slightly cool, and the back shows a tight even grid with no slack rows, which is the honest test of whether a loom this wide was kept under proper tension for the years it took to finish.