4'5" x 6'8" Persian Qum Kork Wool Rug | Floral Medallion with Allover Bouquets | Midnight Navy and Brick Red | 400 KPSI

This 4'5" x 6'8" Persian Qum is a master-level kork wool floral, hand-knotted in the holy city of Qum from the rare ultra-fine throat fleece of the lamb on a cotton foundation, at 400 KPSI (640,000 knots per square meter). The composition centers a small lobed cartouche medallion floating in a deep midnight navy field that is densely populated with floral bouquets, vases, and curling acanthus scrolls in the classical Qum master vocabulary. Brick-red corner spandrels frame the navy field, and an ivory main border flows around the entire rug carrying floral cartouches and shah-abbasi palmettes. Read more in our introduction to Persian Qum guide.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classical Qum lachak-toranj rendered in the workshop's signature dolce floral style. At the very center sits a small lobed quatrefoil toranj medallion, drawn in ivory with a four-lobed brick-red core filled with miniature pink, blue, and gold blossoms. Unlike a standard medallion-and-spandrel where the medallion dominates, this composition places equal weight on the dense allover floral field around it, a design tradition Qum borrowed and refined from earlier Kashan and Sarouk masters. The midnight navy field is filled with carefully arranged floral bouquets, six large clusters distributed symmetrically around the medallion plus dozens of smaller blossoms scattered in between. Each bouquet is built from peony heads, rose blooms, half-open buds, and tiny daisies emerging from curling acanthus leaves, drawn with such fine detail that individual petals and stamens are visible. The four corner spandrels are rendered as pointed arched cartouches in deep brick-red, each filled with the same vocabulary of bouquets and curling vines that animates the central field. The wide ivory main border carries alternating large floral cartouches and small bouquet panels in classic Qum rhythm, framed by multiple narrow guard stripes including a delicate pink-on-cream meandering vine band and a small repeating rosette stripe. Every motif here belongs to the Persian 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 the dramatic contrast of deep midnight navy against warm brick red, lit from within by ivory, soft pink, and pale sky blue. The central medallion sits on a small ivory ground with a brick-red four-petal core, the bouquets at its center rendered in pink, sky blue, and golden yellow with sage green leafwork. The vast navy field surrounding the medallion glows almost black-blue and acts as the dramatic stage on which the floral bouquets perform: each bouquet is rendered in a tight harmonious palette of soft pink and rose, ivory and cream, sky blue, mustard gold, and sage green, with brick-red rosebuds providing the warm accents that pull the eye through the composition. The four brick-red corner spandrels carry the same bouquet vocabulary in rust, gold, and pink against the red ground, providing the strongest tonal break in the rug. The ivory main border flows in warm cream wool, with the alternating cartouches drawn in navy, brick-red, sage, and pink. The narrow inner guard stripe is a thin pink-on-cream meandering rose vine, the outer guard stripe a tiny rose-and-blue rosette repeat, and the very outermost minor stripe a clean ivory band with a small zigzag. The selvages are wrapped in deep coral wool, creating a final warm-tone frame around the cool-tone navy interior, and the ivory cotton fringes finish both ends of the rug with the clean precision typical of Qum master construction.

Persian Qum Rugs and Construction

Qum is the youngest of Persia's great weaving cities. Large-scale rug production only began there in the 1930s, but within a single generation the city 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 royal patronage. While Qum is best known internationally for pure silk floral rugs, Qum kork wool pieces like this one are equally prized by serious collectors, who often consider them the truest expression of Persian master weaving. 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 saturation, and ages into a soft sheen that ordinary mountain wool cannot match. This rug is hand-knotted at 400 KPSI, which works out to 640,000 knots per square meter, and approximately 1.75 million individual hand-tied knots across the full 2.74 square meter surface. The pile is a moderate 0.35 inch high, calibrated for a balance between the visual depth of a hand-knotted floral and the sharp pattern definition that Qum workshops are famous for. The Persian senneh asymmetric knot is used throughout, allowing extremely fine drawing of the curling acanthus and the miniature petals at a level of detail closer to Persian miniature painting than to typical rug weaving. Construction of a kork Qum at this density typically represents twelve to fifteen months of work for a single weaver, and the result is an heirloom-quality piece that will appreciate over generations. Read more in our introduction to Persian Qum guide.