What are Persian Nain Rugs?

The extravagantly luxurious rugs of Nain are well known throughout the world. There cannot be a royal palace anywhere without at least one of these spectacular hand woven carpets. Indeed the Queens drawing room aboard the Royal yacht Britannia had a matching pair of Nain carpets.

Nain rugs have a disinctive palette of cream and blue with soft secondary shades contrasting colour. More often than not, elements in the intricate design are picked out with white silk yarn. The effect is to give the rug a three dimensional quality that really catches the eye.

Nain rugs have a rather unique way of denoting quality. Rather than simply counting the number of knots per inch they are graded  by how many threads make up the warp. If one takes a single strand of the fringe and pull it apart (unravel) one would find either two or three threads in the one strand of fringe.Each of these thread can also be split to reaveal even finer cotton strands.

So counting the number of strands gives an indication of quality. the fewer the strands the thinner the warp thread, the finer the rug will be. 

A warp with 9 threads is called a Nocla, 6 threads is a shishla and just 4 thread a charla but is often called fourla. Fourla is the finest grade, shishla the middle and Nocla the lowest. There is a lower quailty still that is called Tabas. Tabas rugs are great for every day use and less costly to buy than a genuine Nain rug.
This is an easy way of grading a Nain rug. But there are many more elements to take into account when judging the quality of a rug. The quality of the wool pile, the design and colour palette are much more important than simply counting knots.

Habibian Nainsare the recognized best of all Nain carpets; real ones are rare, as production only amounts to about 300-325 per year. All are pre-sold and few come on to the open market. I have only had one Habibian rug in 30 years of trading.

Here at OlneyRugs.co.uk I stock Shishla and Nocla grades and I keep a good stock of both qualities.