Even though we choose each rug in our collection carefully and lovingly, some go unsold. We’ll be offering those rugs at greatly reduced prices over the next two weeks, during our March Clearance Sale.
Take a look here to see the hundreds of rugs available at a deep discount.
As always, you are free to try the rugs at home before you buy.
In the late 1970s, Pakistani rugmakers came up with a new product, known in the trade as the Pakistani Persian or the Pakistani 16/18, which is still made. As the second name implies, the knot-count of these rugs is a nominal 16 by 18 per square inch, for a total of 288 knots per square inch. That is really quite a finely knotted rug, and the production has enjoyed deserved success.
Designs almost always are Persian, the pile is Australian or New Zealand wool, body is very heavy, colors, though synthetic, are well chosen and attractive. They are sold in three grades called A, B, and C.
It interests me that three different weavers, all working with the same number of knots per square inch, and all weaving the same design, produce rugs that differ radically in quality. Grade A Pakistani Persians are impressively clear on their surfaces. Details are discernible, designs are coherent. Grade C rugs, with the same number of knots per inch, seem out of focus, muddy, confused. What accounts for the difference? The weaver’s skill. The rugs are graded upon completion, and weavers paid on that basis.
Most likely, Pakistani Persian rugs were produced to fill the vacuum created when the U.S. ceased trading with Iran. At a time when U.S. dealers were no longer able to buy Persian rugs, Pakistani Persians were practically the only finely knotted, Persian-looking rugs available.
Bokharas are a type of handmade Pakistani rug; also known as Bukharas or Bokaras, they predate the rug renaissance.
Though Pakistani Bokharas are scorned by collectors, they have turned out to be honest rugs. Most are based on Turkmen prototypes called Tekkes, with repeating octagonal figures called guls, usually on fields of burgundy red, gray blue, or sometimes green.
One line of these rugs is thick and of average weave, and they are known as 9/16 doubles, meaning that they have 144 knots per square inch. They are quite inexpensive, and luxurious feeling because of their thick, soft wool imported from either Australia or New Zealand.
In 1977, a rug dealer and writer named Georges Izmidlian wrote: ‘In countries where an informed body of opinion has grown up on the subject of oriental rugs, a distinction is drawn between those from Persia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Russia, and those from other areas which produce similar goods. Only the former are entitled to be described as real oriental rugs.’
You will notice that that leaves out the rugs of Pakistan and India. It was rather harsh, even then — not even to consider Pakistani and Indian rugs ‘real Orientals’ — but at the time I might have agreed with him. Many still do. Pakistan was known for one kind of rug, the Pakistani Bokhara, produced by the thousands and sneered at as much for its popular success as for its aesthetic shortcomings. Pakistani Bokharas seemed especially vapid to a generation newly in love with tribal rugs. Further, it was thought that Pakistan had no tradition of rugmaking (no one has ever heard of an antique Pakistani rug, after all), and that rug weaving in Pakistan was strictly commercial. Hence, Pakistani rugs were unreal.
Twenty-some years later, Pakistan and India arguably have contributed more to the rug revolution than any country except Turkey. A few people have even realized that if no one has ever heard of an antique Pakistani rug, it may be because Pakistan didn’t exist until after World War II. Until then it was part of India. Some of history’s greatest carpets were woven in Lahore, produced for the Mughal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Indeed, Pakistan does have a rug tradition, quite a proud one. But old attitudes die hard, and most people whose knowledge about Oriental rugs was gained some years ago remain leery of Pakistani and Indian products. The truth today is that Pakistan’s and India’s best rugs are as good as rugs made anywhere (and just as expensive).
Stay tuned as we post about the ubiquitous Pakistani Bokhara rug, the so-called Pakistani Persian carpet, and the various producers who are driving the Pakistani rug renaissance.
Tibetan rugs are now some of the brightest stars in the oriental rug market. Just twenty-five years ago things could not have been more different. Here’s the story.
In 1949 the Chinese invaded Tibet, and inadvertently changed the modern history of Oriental carpets. Before then, Tibetans made rugs for their own uses, which often involved religious ceremonies. There was little, if any, commerce in new Tibetan rugs outside Tibet (though today the oldest rugs from Tibet are among the most desirable to collectors). The Chinese invasion forced thousands of Tibetans to flee, and many who survived the journey out of the mountains took weaving skills with them to Nepal and India, where they established carpet industries to support themselves. In Nepal, no carpet industry had existed before the Tibetan refugees created one.
Today, Tibetan rugs (by which name all rugs made by Tibetans are known, whether woven in Nepal, Tibet, or India) are among the brightest stars in the rug firmament. A retailer in Reno, Nevada tells me that 60 percent of all his sales are in Tibetan rugs. Twenty-five years ago, during the formative stages of the Tibetan rug industry, things could not have been more different. Most of the Tibetan rugs reaching the United States were made with luster-less, machine-spun Indian wool in bright synthetic dyes. Sizes were limited and designs were interesting only in their novelty.
Oriental Rugs Today: Chapter 4 Part 4
Of all the rug-weaving countries in the world, Turkey may be the most fun for travelers looking to buy. Rugs and carpets have been made there for centuries, so travelers find rugs of all ages in the Turkish bazaars and a huge assortment of them from thousands of villages. Many Turkish rugs are great-looking, too. Often they have a genuine tribal character, rarely looking stamped-out or stiff. Futhermore, Turkish rug merchants are engaging people who can make the whole process of buying a rug fun, and they are perfectly capable of shipping rugs internationally.
Given these attractions, travelers often buy rugs abroad that they wouldn’t have bought had they had an opportunity to try a rug at home on an approval basis. Travelers get caught up in the local aesthetic and admire rugs in Turkey, for instance, that don’t look so good to them at home. Of course that is not the fault of Turkish merchants.
Oriental Rugs Today: Chapter 4 Part 3. See the posts on Woven Legends and the DOBAG project for more about those productions.
One of the earliest and best productions from Turkey was created by a Turkish gentleman named Suat Izmirili, who established Anadol Oriental Rugs in 1984. At first, Anadol produced rugs with synthetic dyes, convinced that natural dyes were not practical. But when Woven Legends’ example proved them wrong, Anadol soon began using natural dyes. Today Anadol makes among the best rugs in Turkey. But, faced with production problems there, Anadol has largely shifted its production to Pakistan and Egypt.
Friday, February 1st - Thursday, February 14th
During 38 years in business, we’ve gathered an amazing collection of odds and ends stuck away in trunks and in lofts and storage bins. It’s time for us to let it all go, and we would like to offer it to you first.
For instance, for years we have hung onto a number of very old rugs in poor condition that are wonderful study pieces or rugs for mounting on the wall. We’re offering them from $50 to $375 each. A couple of worn, room-sized carpets will sell for about $350.
Oriental Rugs Today: Chapter 4 Part 2
DOBAG was the start of the Oriental rug renaissance, but George Jevremovic (Yev REM o vich…but everyone in the industry refers to him as George) took it to the next level under the company named Woven Legends. In 1977 he left graduate school in the States, where he studied literature, history, and creative writing, and followed his girlfriend to Turkey. He took up permanent residence there beginning in 1979, at first teaching in an American school in Istanbul, then buying and selling old Turkish rugs and kilims. In 1980 he and his Turkish girlfriend, Neslihan Christobel Jevremovic, were married. (Neslihan, an engineer, joined the family business in 1987 and has since been a 50 percent owner and an important part of the business. She and George work together amicably though they are no longer married.)
George was in love with antique carpets, and bored by new rugs. The crucial difference, he came to believe, was that old rugs were made from natural dyes and new rugs from synthetic. But he was impressed when, in 1981, he first saw DOBAG-inspired rugs from the villages around Ayvacik. He proceeded to buy hundreds of small pieces, selling them to dealers in New York. In 1982 he opened his own wholesale business in Philadelphia. By the following year he was asking weavers around Ayvacik to make rugs in runner sizes for him, some of them in his own designs. But he began to realize that the tribal nature of Ayvacik culture constrained him from making the kinds of rugs that really interested him. He wanted to make large pieces, and that required an infrastructure he didn’t think Ayvacik could support. He wanted the same kind of charm and naivete in large rugs that one usually finds only in small ones, and he wanted to weave rugs in early designs, especially designs from northern Iran.
Oriental Rugs Today: Chapter 4 Part 1
The undisputed first mover of the renaissance of Oriental rugs was a German chemist named Harald Bohmer. In 1960 he took a seven-year teaching job in Turkey and, like many Westerners before and since, fell in love with Turkish rugs. He was different, though, in being especially interested in the dyes in Turkish rugs. When his teaching contract expired, he took the first opportunity to return, and in 1974 was again teaching in Turkey. In the meantime he had learned the language and had fallen in love with the country. His interest in rugs and dyes became a passion. When he learned of a method of analyzing dyes in fabrics (thin layer chromatography), he began an exhaustive, methodical analysis of dyes in Turkish rugs. Not only did he succeed in identifying the dyes used in hundreds of carpets of all ages, but he was able to decipher the actual processes involved in formulating the dyes and applying them to wool yarn. More to the point, he learned what natural dyestuffs rugmakers had used 100 years earlier, before the dyer’s art had been lost, and in some cases he learned how these artisans had used them.
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