KashmarSee in the carpet dictionary sits in Razavi Khorasan, the province that fills the north-eastern corner of Iran, about 150 kilometres south-west of Mashhad in a straight line and a good deal further by road. It is a small city and the seat of its own county, standing on a plain that falls away southward toward the salt desert. The district around it was long known as Turshiz, and the town took its present name in the twentieth century. It has nothing to do with Kashmir in the Himalayas, a confusion the similar spelling invites often enough to be worth stating plainly. A Kashmar rug is a Persian rug, woven in Khorasan.

Sheep farming is one of the district's principal occupations, on a scale large enough that weavers work from woolSee in the carpet dictionary grown around them rather than fleece bought in from elsewhere. That matters for the finished rug. The wool is used because it is at hand and because the people handling it know it well, and the pileSee in the carpet dictionary it produces is consistently described as high grade. It is the first thing a Kashmar has in its favour, before any question of design or knot countSee in the carpet dictionary comes up, and it is a large part of why the colour sits so well on the surface.

Dyeing is done with plant dyes made from what grows in the district, and conditions there are good enough, wild plants included, that the dyers have a wide range to draw on. The colours that come out of them are soft rather than saturated, sitting quietly together instead of competing for attention. It is the quality most likely to strike you from across a room, well before any of the drawing can be made out, and it sets a Kashmar apart from the sharper, more emphatic colour of the big city workshops.

Overall the palette is subdued and earth-toned. Brownish cream carries most fields, with light blue and dark blue doing the drawing, and a particular soft pink turns up often enough to count as a local habit. Orange is the colour to look for. An orange tone is easy to find in a Kashmar and genuinely hard to find in Persian weaving generally, so where a room wants warm orange, brown and dark blue rather than red, this is one of the few origins that supplies the combination without being asked.

Finished rugs rarely stay in the town. They are carried to Mashhad and sold into that market, the old arrangement of a small place weaving and a large city trading, which is why Kashmar pieces have often travelled under a Khorasan or a Mashhad label. One consequence is worth knowing. The wine-red and burgundy grounds many people associate with Khorasan belong to Mashhad, which draws that red from a dye plant of its own area, and not to Kashmar; a rug leaning on deep wine red is almost certainly not from here.

The design repertoire begins with a medallionSee in the carpet dictionary and corner layout inside a firmly drawn border, filled with flowers and scrolling vine. A common variant keeps the same architecture but substitutes vases for the flowers, and Kashmar is one of the main homes of that vase designSee in the carpet dictionary, alongside BakhtiariSee in the carpet dictionary, Tabriz, SaroukSee in the carpet dictionary and QumSee in the carpet dictionary. The usual arrangement sets one large vase at the centre with smaller ones distributed around it, repeated across the field. In Persian usage a vase of flowers reads as growth and opportunity rather than as a still life.

The town is most closely identified with the garden panel, kheshtiSee in the carpet dictionary in Persian: a field divided by a grid into compartments, each framed and each carrying a different scene. The number of panels follows the size of the rug, so a large piece may run a separate scene in every compartment. Panels usually take a single flat background colour, which keeps the grid legible from standing height and stops the composition turning into visual noise at the scale these rugs are woven.

Scenes named in these rugs include ducks on a lake among flowers and trees, a tree of lifeSee in the carpet dictionary, singing birds, and deer in a wood. Some pieces run the four seasons across the field, one panel in autumn colour, another in summer, another in winter. Bakhtiari is the name most often attached to the panel design as a whole, and Tabriz weaves it too, but the Kashmar version is the one that narrates: each compartment is drawn clearly enough that a viewer can tell the story back unaided, without being told first what it shows.

An old idea sits underneath the form. A garden, to a Persian weaver, stands for paradise, and the grid turns the field into a row of framed windows onto it, each holding flowers for fertility, cypress trees, birds. The gardens are invented rather than copied from anywhere real; they picture what the weaver hopes for rather than a place that exists. Anyone hoping to identify the actual garden a panel rug depicts is looking for something that was never there to begin with.

Beyond the panels, the town weaves pictorial rugs, deliberately antique-looking compositions built from vases and flowers, landscape and hunting designs, and pieces showing the kings of the ancient world. These are rugs that hang as readily as they are walked on. They are less common than the panel and medallion work and repay close examination, since a pictorial rugSee in the carpet dictionary stands or falls on how well the faces, animals and foliage are drawn, not on fineness alone.

Construction is where the record thins out. Kashmar weaving is consistently reported as finely knotted, but no dependable knot count exists for the origin, so none is quoted here; ask for the count of the rug in front of you. Wool pile on a cotton foundation is the norm for town weaves of this region, though that too is worth confirming piece by piece. Pile height is the one measurement the weave declares plainly: cut thinner to medium, closer to Sarouk than to the medium-to-thicker pile of Tabriz, Kashan, Mashhad or Bakhtiari.

Sizes run large. These are habitually room-size rugs, which is what the panel designs need if every compartment is to have room to be read, and the big format is the rule here rather than the exception. A lower pile also holds fine drawing crisply and sits more easily under a dining table or a door that swings over it. The name carries less recognition than Tabriz, Kashan or Mashhad; anyone judging by weave instead of by reputation tends to find that a good Kashmar stands comparison with better-known towns on wool, colour and drawing.

A Persian rug is an Iranian rug — a rug hand-knottedSee in the carpet dictionary in Iran — and the tradition behind it is the oldest documented anywhere. The earliest surviving carpet, the Pazyryk rugSee in the carpet dictionary, was found preserved in a frozen burial mound and dates to the fifth century BC — roughly 2,500 years ago — and it is already accomplished work, not a beginner's craft. What began as warm, hard-wearing floor coverings for tribal households grew, over those centuries, into the art form that every other rug-weaving country has borrowed from.

Two later chapters shaped what a Persian carpet looks like today. Under the Safavid dynastySee in the carpet dictionary, from 1501 to 1732, the court promoted weaving alongside painting and calligraphy, and the workshops of Tabriz, HeratSee in the carpet dictionary, Kashan and Kerman produced the masterpieces that now sit in museums. This is when the great central medallionSee in the carpet dictionary appeared, and when designs grew elaborate enough that a separate designer — often a miniature painter — drew the pattern onto a cartoon for the weaver to follow. The second chapter came in the nineteenth century, under the Qajar dynastySee in the carpet dictionary, when production reached its historical peak, exports to Europe and America boomed, and the workshop industry whose descendants still weave today took its modern shape.

The trade sorts Persian rugs into three families. City rugs — Tabriz, Kashan, Kerman, Nain, Isfahan — are woven in workshops from a drawn design, carry the highest knot densities and come in the widest range of colours, sizes and patterns. Village rugs such as HerizSee in the carpet dictionary, BakhtiariSee in the carpet dictionary and KarajaSee in the carpet dictionary sit in between, mostly geometric and largely woven from memory. Tribal rugs — Baluch, TurkomanSee in the carpet dictionary, QashqaiSee in the carpet dictionary, each named after the people who weave it — are made on small portable looms, so they run smaller, and their bold geometric drawing comes from the weaver's own head rather than from paper.

The design vocabulary draws on a deep stock of motifs: Shah AbbasiSee in the carpet dictionary palmettes, flowing arabesques, the small repeating Herati patternSee in the carpet dictionary, medallions, garden and tree-of-life compositions. These combine with regional habits into styles a practised eye can place at a glance, from the bold geometric medallions of Heriz to the fine curvilinear florals of Isfahan.

The classic palette is built on natural dyes: madderSee in the carpet dictionary reds, indigo blues, saffron yellows and the soft whites of undyed woolSee in the carpet dictionary, settled into combinations refined over centuries. Natural dyes age gracefully, mellowing into the patina that older rugs are prized for, and slight shifts of tone between dye batchesSee in the carpet dictionary — the effect called abrashSee in the carpet dictionary — are a mark of small-batch natural dyeing, not a flaw.

The pileSee in the carpet dictionary is almost always woolSee in the carpet dictionary, and in a Persian wool rug the wool itself decides much of the quality. The best fleece comes from high-altitude flocks, where it grows thicker and richer in natural oils; spring-sheared wool beats the autumn clip, and hand-spun yarnSee in the carpet dictionary gives a finer, softer thread than machine spinning. Fine pieces add silk highlights to a wool pile, and at the very top sits the Persian silk rug, woven in pure silk. Foundations are usually cotton in city weaving, wool in tribal and older pieces, silk at the very top of the range.

Every knot is tied by hand, one at a time, in one of two forms: the asymmetric Persian knotSee in the carpet dictionary, usual in central and eastern Iran, or the symmetric Turkish knotSee in the carpet dictionary, common in the north-west ever since Seljuk weavers introduced it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A large rug holds in the region of two million knots and can occupy a weaver for about a year.

Knot densitySee in the carpet dictionary is the figure newcomers fixate on, and the finest silk-foundation pieces do reach as much as 1,000 knots per square inch. But densitySee in the carpet dictionary only matters as far as the drawing demands it: a curvilinear Isfahan needs a fine weave to stay sharp, while a geometric Heriz is famously durable at a modest count. Material, symmetry, colour harmony and condition say more about quality than any single number.

Persian carpets settle into modern rooms as naturally as classical ones, as a focal point in a living room, a foundation under a dining table or a quieter accent in a bedroom. Care is undemanding: gentle vacuuming without a rotating brush, an occasional turn for even wear, and a professional wash about every five years — sooner in a hallway or entrance, less often in a quiet room.

A hand-knotted Persian rug tends to outlast its owners. Pieces a century old regularly survive in fine condition, their colours settled and their pile supple, often looking better than when they left the loomSee in the carpet dictionary. A well-chosen, well-kept rug holds its worth and passes down as a family heirloom rather than being replaced — which is precisely what the knots, the wool and the dyes were always for.