Kashan is the other extreme of this catalog. Of the 129 Kashan rugs we hold, 85 are over seventy-five square feet, and the middle of the price range sits around $2,025. Nothing else we sell is that consistently large or that consistently formal.
A city, and a workshop tradition
Kashan is a city in central Iran with a weaving history that runs back to the Safavid court. By the twentieth century it meant organized workshops: a designer drew the cartoon, master weavers followed it knot by knot, and the result was a rug built to a specification rather than improvised at the loom.
That is why a Kashan looks the way it does. There is almost always a central medallion, corner pieces that answer it, and a field filled with curving vine and palmette work. The drawing is curvilinear where a Heriz is angular, and the difference is not taste, it is method: a workshop cartoon can draw a curve, a village weaver working from memory usually will not.
The palette
Deep red and navy carry most of ours, with cream doing the drawing on top. It is a serious combination and it does serious things to a room. A Kashan under a dining table reads as deliberate in a way a pale rug does not. If that is not what you want, the neutral collection is the other direction.
How to recognize one
The medallion. Central, usually pointed at both ends, with matching corner spandrels. The curve. Vines that actually curve rather than stepping. The density. Kashan weaving is fine, the pile is low, and the back shows small tight knots with the design fully legible. All but a handful of ours are low pile.
Buying one
These are room rugs. If you are putting one under a dining table, measure for chairs pulled out, not chairs pushed in; the size guide has the numbers. Most of our Kashans are big enough for that and many are big enough to carry a full living room.
They run from about $230 for the rare small piece up to around $3,700. That is the top of our range, and for a hand-knotted city rug that has already lasted fifty years it is still a fraction of what the equivalent new piece costs. Browse the Kashan collection or all oversized rugs.
