5'2" x 7'10" Persian Qum Rug | Pure Silk | 800 Knots Per Square Inch | Signed Qum Khales

Pick this rug up and the first thing you notice is the weight, or rather the lack of it. Silk warp, silk weft, silk pile, 28 knots to the inch in both directions, and the whole thing folds over your arm like heavy cloth rather than a floor covering. That density is what lets the drawing hold together at this scale: the vine tips stay round, the tiny blossom centers stay legible, and the medallion outline never breaks into steps. It is roughly 10 years old, which for a rug of this construction means it has barely begun its life, and it has never been walked on. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity. Among pure silk Persian rugs this is the grade people spend years looking for and rarely find in a usable room size.

Design and Motifs

A round gold medallion sits dead center, built up in concentric rings: a sage green core with an 8 petal rosette, then a band of pink and coral blossoms on pale yellow, then a scalloped camel ring of scrolling arabesques edged in blue dots. Above and below it hang two lobed pendants in the same yellow, each holding a small symmetrical bouquet. Everything outside the medallion is navy, and it is not empty for a single knot: thin ivory vines loop across the whole field carrying cream, pink, apricot and sky blue flowers, with slim green leaves filling the gaps. The corner spandrels break to olive and salmon, drawn with curling cloudband leaves and cypress sprays. The main border runs bright yellow with alternating coral boteh cartouches and blue star flowers, framed by olive guard stripes and a narrow navy outer band that finishes at a multicolored wrapped fringe in blue, yellow and red.

The Color

The field is a true midnight navy, deep enough to read as near black in shade and to flash a clear royal blue when the light catches the silk from the other direction. Against it the palette is deliberately soft: buttery gold and pale lemon in the medallion and border, camel and olive in the framing rings, salmon and coral in the boteh and the spandrels, rose pink and lilac in the smaller blossoms, and a cool sky blue that appears in every star flower and keeps the warm tones from going syrupy. Ivory does the outlining work throughout, which is why the drawing stays crisp at this knot count. Because the pile is silk rather than wool, the color is not fixed: walk around the rug and the gold border swings from pale cream to deep amber while the navy shifts from black to blue. That directional change is the reason silk rugs of this quality are so often hung rather than laid.

Qum and the Signature

Qum sits south of Tehran and is the youngest of the great Persian weaving centers, with production starting only in the 1930s, yet it took the crown for silk within a generation because the workshops there compete on nothing but fineness. The end panel of this rug carries a woven cartouche reading Qum Khales, which translates as pure Qum, a maker's declaration that warp, weft and pile are all silk with nothing blended in. It is not a weaver's name, it is a quality mark, and at 800 knots per square inch the weave backs the claim up. If you want the full picture of how the town's ateliers work and what separates the grades, our guide to Persian Qum silk rugs covers it in detail.