3'5" x 5'4" Persian Qum Kork Wool Rug | Floral Medallion | Indigo & Sky Blue | 400 KPSI

This 3'5" x 5'4" Persian Qum is hand-knotted from pure kork wool, the rare, ultra-fine fleece taken from the throat and underbelly of the lamb on a cotton foundation at a remarkable 400 knots per square inch. The composition centers on a small floral medallion floating inside an arched cream cartouche, surrounded by an extraordinarily dense field of curling islimi vines, palmettes, and split-leaf arabesques. A multi-stripe border crowns the rug in deep indigo and sky blue. Qum is the youngest of the great Persian weaving cities yet has, in just a few generations, become a benchmark for fineness and refinement. Read more in our introduction to Persian Qum guide.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic Qum lachak-toranj, central medallion with corresponding pendants, adapted into the workshop's signature shah-abbasi floral idiom. At the center sits a small lozenge-shaped toranj medallion in indigo, filled with a symmetrical bouquet of yellow and red palmettes radiating from a tiny ivory rosette, with two arrow-tipped pendants reaching toward the top and bottom of the field. Surrounding the medallion, an arched cream cartouche frames the entire central composition, an architectural device borrowed from Persian mihrab and tile design that gives the rug a sense of sacred enclosure. Filling every remaining inch of the cartouche is a dense network of islimi (curling arabesque) vines that scroll into mirrored cypress-leaf forms, intertwined with shah-abbasi palmettes, peony heads, half-blossoms, and tiny rosebuds. The four corner spandrels outside the arch carry the same vine vocabulary against a sky blue ground. The main border presents a single row of sixteen large lotus rosettes alternating with smaller flower clusters on a deep indigo ground. Every motif here belongs to the Safavid paradise garden tradition, where the rug is meant to read as an idealized walled garden in eternal bloom.

Colors and Placement

The palette is built on a cool indigo-and-sky-blue foundation lit up by warm golds, ivories, and small touches of red. The central medallion sits on a deep indigo ground, with golden yellow palmettes, terracotta red pomegranates, and pale blue sub-petals fanning out from a yellow core. The arched field surrounding the medallion is rendered in soft ivory cream, hosting the islimi vines in pale sky blue, sage green, mustard yellow, and warm camel brown, with tiny accents of crimson red and rose pink dotted through the blossoms. The four corner spandrels switch to a sky blue ground that frames the cream cartouche and creates a strong tonal break between the central oval and the outer composition. The main border runs on a saturated indigo ground, with the lotus rosettes rendered alternately in sky blue, ivory, golden yellow, and pale green, and tiny red dots accenting each flower core. Inner and outer guard stripes run in pale lavender pink, ivory, and ice blue, with a final narrow zigzag minor stripe in green and red along the very edge. The ivory cotton fringes finish the ends, and the selvages are wrapped in dark indigo, framing the whole composition like a jewel-set border.

Persian Qum Rugs and Construction

Qum is the youngest of Persia's great weaving cities large-scale carpet production only began there in the 1930s, but the city quickly established itself as the finest workshop tradition in modern Iran, drawing master weavers from Kashan, Isfahan, and Tabriz to a holy city long associated with pilgrimage and patronage. Qum is best known today for its pure silk rugs, but its kork wool pieces are equally prized among collectors. Kork is the throat and underbelly fleece of the lamb, the softest and longest-stapled wool the animal produces. It is hand-spun extremely fine, takes dye with silk-like luster, and ages into a soft sheen that ordinary mountain wool cannot match. This rug is hand-knotted at 400 KPSI, which translates to roughly 620,000 knots per square meter, over 1.3 million individual hand-tied knots across the full surface of this 1.63 by 1.04 meter piece. The Persian senneh asymmetric knot used here allows extremely fine drawing of the curling arabesques without distortion, which is why Qum master weavers can render florals at a level of detail closer to miniature painting than to traditional rug weaving. Construction of a kork Qum at this density typically represents nine to twelve months of work for a single weaver. Read more in our introduction to Persian Qum guide.