Iran Carpet Museum

The Iran Carpet Museum, in a 1970s building near Laleh Park designed to resemble a loom, holds a collection of around 130 historic carpets spanning four centuries and all of Iran's major weaving traditions. Persian carpet is to Iran what Gothic cathedral building was to medieval France — the supreme technical and artistic achievement of its civilisation — and this collection makes that case more clearly than any other single place.

The carpets are displayed flat and lit from above, which allows you to read the designs as the weavers intended. The range is extraordinary: the geometric tribal patterns of the Qashqai and Bakhtiari nomads, the elaborate curvilinear court carpets of the Safavid workshops, the soft palette of Tabriz and the jewel-bright colours of Isfahan. Several pieces date from the 16th and 17th centuries and are in better condition than examples in European museums that were not used underfoot. A knowledgeable guide makes an enormous difference here.

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The most technically demanding carpet in the museum is a 16th-century Safavid hunting-ground carpet from Kerman — a room-sized piece whose weavers achieved 800 knots per square inch. At that density, a single square metre contains more than 8 million individual knots, each tied by hand. The design shows a hunting scene so detailed that individual animals in the border are distinguishable as specific species. It took an estimated three years to weave.

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