Red Lace Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted in Qum, with silk fringe at both ends and the weaver's signature worked into the red outer band at one end. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

The deep red and navy grounds are forgiving of small marks, but the fine ivory and gold blossoms and the scroll outlines of the frame are the most delicate drawing on the rug and the first to soften with wear. The signature sits in the red band right beside the fringe, where a floor rug takes the most handling. This is a piece to hang or to keep at a bedside.

Look at the edge of this rug before anything else. Persian carpets almost always end in a straight border — a band of repeating ornament between ruled guard stripes. This one does not. Its frame is a chain of scallops, each made from two C-shaped scrolls curling towards each other around a rosette, and the plain red of the outer band shows through the gaps between them. The C-scroll is the signature ornament of European rococo, the style of eighteenth-century French furniture, mirrors and plasterwork, and Qum weavers borrowed it when they wanted a rug to look lighter and more decorative than a classical carpet. It changes how the whole piece reads: without a hard rectangular frame, the rug seems to end the way a piece of lace does, in a soft, open edge. Inside, the design is Persian again — a navy medallion with arched finials, a red field of tiny blossoms — so the rug is a meeting of the two traditions, with the European one wrapped around the outside.