When you think about upscale interior design, antiques and fine art are naturally the first items that come to mind. Antiques have an undeniable ability to add personality and character to the décor of any home. Because of their uniqueness many people opt to incorporate antiques into their living spaces. Whether it is something handed down through generations or found in an antique shop many homeowners make “antiquing” a hobby in order to add personal flair to their homes.

An antique is an item that is at least 80 – 100 years old and for the most part they are both decorative as well as collectible. An antique item is desired and collected because of its age, beauty, rarity, and use. One type of antique that many people collect for their homes are antique rugs. Funnily enough, many of the antique carpets are comparable and at times even cheaper in price than brand new rugs. Once you establish your budget, size requirements and overall look and feel your quest for the right piece begins!

Antique rugs may be found in many different looks and colors. The more “traditional” style carpets such as Tabriz, Kashan and Khorassan will usually have intricate patterns and can be found in a wide array of colors from the jewel tones to the light and airy. These types of pieces give a regal and elegant look to most rooms. However, modern design tends to be simpler in taste and style. Many of the designs in recent years favor a more minimalistic approach to the interior design. Incorporating antique carpets with subtle colors and a more abstract look (like arts and crafts or art deco) will go a long way and will add a warmth and texture to the space.

Another type of antique carpet that is often used in more modern settings are Moroccan rugs. Moroccan rugs are a fabulous way to invite warmth and create a bright and appealing atmosphere in your home. The simple tribal geometric patterns of these rugs (some of which are taken from the Tattoo designs of the Berber tribes) have been used for some-time to allow a sophisticated look to go with modern furniture. Many historic homes boast these Moroccan rugs such as one of America’s most famous architects of the modern era: Frank Lloyd Wright.

Although, it is more traditional to display your antique carpet on the floor, it can also be displayed on the wall as a work of art (which the antique carpets actually are). In the right lighting you will be able to see the artistry behind these artisanal antique rugs.

A rug tends to be the most expensive item in a room when decorating so it is imperative to get a piece that you will love for a long time. It is also important to purchase the rug from a dealer that you trust. A good dealer will provide you with information, images, and history of the rug as well as give you the option to trade in the rug for a different piece in the future. Be wary of dealers who tell you that the rug will be worth much more in “X” years because there is no way to estimate what any piece will fetch in the future as demands will always change to fit the ever-changing interior design trends. It is best to establish a good relationship with your dealer since down the line you might want to acquire a better piece or might simply want a different look.

So, why buy an antique rug? They clearly allow a very versatile and stylish look for your home decor. With their patina (that can only come with age), texture and their variety of colors and designs, they can liven up any modern, traditional or casual room and make your interior look picturesque and magnificent.

Over the years the trends, patters, and design of interiors have been reinventing themselves every few years but the demand and appreciation for antique rugs has remained. Great antique carpets, just like great paintings will never go out of style and the demand has only increased over the years.

On June 4, The New York Nazmiyal gallery welcomed AIG Private Client Group’s Risk Management Specialists for an educational lecture on new and antique carpets from around the world. Betsy Murphy, our antique carpet specialist, provided insight on carpet classifications and identifiers to help distinguish between fine quality antique carpets and new production carpets.

AIG Private Client Group provides comprehensive insurance products and risk management solutions to successful individuals and families.

One of the great commonplaces of the rug market is the supposed distinction between antique rugs of the sort sought after by collectors and those that appeal to clients who are primarily interested in decorating their homes or offices. This sweeping distinction involves a range of underlying oppositions – the difference between the design traditions used in village or tribal weaving and those used in urban rug production, the difference between small rugs and trappings versus larger or room-sized rugs, a rich and varied palette versus one that is cooler and more limited, and a knowledgeable interest in the rare and esoteric as opposed to a desire for what is simply beautiful or attractive.

Antique rug collectors come off as scholars more or less, endowed to one degree or another with a learned historical perspective. They tend to approach rugs from the vantage of ethnography. They are interested in tribal or regional distinctions and the place of a given piece in a larger development. They want pieces made for local use, which they see as authentic, in opposition to rugs made simply for commercial export. They tend to acquire pieces of scatter size or smaller that typified village and tribal weaving, where larger rugs were less common. Collectors accept and admire the often quirky or wild design sensibility and coloration of tribal and village rugs.

Decorative rug enthusiasts, on the other hand are interested in acquiring ornamental floor coverings that work within a larger, coordinated system or plan of interior furnishing. Consequently, they tend toward rugs that are bigger, whose designs and coloration are more subdued or less obtrusive, and therefore capable of blending in more easily with their surroundings. Since rugs of this size tended to be made in urban-centered workshops, it was the more sophisticated oriental design tradition of the cities that became synonymous with the notion of the decorative rugs and the taste they appeal to. Owners of decorative rugs are also assumed not to be immediately concerned with the historical development or rarity of the pieces they acquire, but primarily with their visual appeal.

Seen in these terms, the difference between collectible and decorative antique rugs would seem to be a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon. But as with all polar oppositions, those sketched above are predicated on assumptions, often simplistic, which obscure and distort what is really a more complex situation. Collectors interested in antique nomadic tribal weavings do acquire larger rugs or main carpets, just as those interested in classical Persian, Turkish, or Indian carpets must consider buying pieces fifteen to twenty feet long or more. Collector pieces of this sort will inevitably go on the floor, and as such they must function as interior furnishings, or, dare one say, as decorative rugs. And while actual statistics may be lacking, it is virtually certain that many collectors use even scatter size rugs as floor covering, or as furniture throws, where they too function as an integral part of interior décor. Nor is it clear that collector pieces are essentially equatable with tribal and village rugs. Collectors of early Turkish, Persian, and Indian rugs are clearly interested in pieces with classic Islamic urban design, the same types of design that inspired most of the decorative rugs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is more, various urban-derived small sized Turkish and Persian rugs of the nineteenth century, Hereke, Ghiordes, Farahan or Kerman, are considered collectible. From this perspective much of the distinction between collectible and decorative rugs collapses.

To put it somewhat differently, many, perhaps most collector rugs can also be decorative rugs, while some, but not all decorative rugs are collectible. So, if antique tribal and/or classical pieces with richer color and strident designs, even smaller ones, can be used as decorative rugs, then what aspects of the conception of antique decorative rugs discussed above do in fact distinguish them from collector pieces? It is the notion that essentially decorative rug buyers have no real interest in the history and development of designs, and that they are looking for pieces with subdued design and coloration. But who says that the affluent, tasteful, highly educated buyers who largely constitute the clientele for decorative antique rugs have no interest in the history or artistic development of the piece they acquire, or that with some encouragement, they could acquire such interests? And who says that they want designs and colors that will fade into the woodwork so as not to overwhelm the surrounding upholstery and window treatments? These too are simplistic assumptions, and to the extent that they are true, they may not represent the genuine, unfettered sensibilities of the clients themselves, but rather the opinions and strategies of the interior designers who represent them and who define and control market trend.

The proclivity of many interior designers or decorators for rugs with neutral or soft coloration and less obtrusive, allover repeat designs is well known in the rug trade, and it should come as no surprise that rug dealers cater to such taste in the interest of selling rugs. But what is less clear is whether the designers are catering in turn to the taste of their clients, or whether they are in fact imposing their own taste for their own reasons on those clients. It is far easier to coordinate a room around an unobtrusive rug than to do so with a piece whose design and color make any kind of expressive artistic statement. But if decorators encouraged their clients to appreciate central medallion designs and the beauty of saturated vegetable dyes, and if they took the trouble to impart something of the history behind the designs, who is to say that market trend might not be vastly different than it is now.

Nor are collectors without responsibility for the polarized view of collectible and decorative rugs. Why is it that an outstanding Serapi, Bakshaish, or Sultanabad carpet should not be collectible, although few if any collectors would admit it? As marketplace rugs produced for commercial export, they apparently lack the cultural authenticity that is so enticing to collectors. But why? Serapi, Bakshaish, and Sultanabad carpets arose from a larger, conscious revival of traditional rug production in nineteenth-century Iran, much the same as nineteenth century Kazak, Karabagh, or Shirvan rugs represent a similar revival in the Caucasus. And why do we assume that pieces which still entice collectors – nomadic tribal rugs like Turkomans or the great village weavings of the Caucasus – would automatically have more cultural authenticity, when it is documented that their production in the late nineteenth century was fostered and controlled by the Czarist Russian government precisely for commercial export to the West? There can be no doubt that a divide between collector and decorative rugs is widely thought to exist among rug enthusiasts, but it predicated largely on subjective perspectives which have become so ingrained over time that they have acquired the status of unquestioned validity.

It may be useful to conclude by examining number 896 from the Nazmiyal Collection, seen above, a carpet that does not fall readily into the collectible or decorative categories, and which poses a sort of challenge to collectors and decorative rug buyers alike. This is an early twentieth century antique English piece produced as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Its design is based closely on classical Turkish rugs of the so-called Small Pattern Holbein type made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The field has a pattern of quatrefoil medallions and interlace roundels staggered alternately in vertical columns. The border is of the so-called “pseudo-Kufic type with interlacing reminiscent of the field, perhaps the most interesting border type known on Turkish rugs of this type. Even the coloration of the piece with its emphasis on reds, blue greens, aubergine, and gold flows the Turkish prototypes closely.

Now who would buy such a rug? Certainly no collector. But why not. The piece is a genuine Arts and Crafts antique, and like all good antiques it has the aura of another time and place. A collector would have the knowledge to appreciate the historical reference so central to the Arts and Crafts Movement. A collector, moreover, might appreciate this rug as the heir to a longstanding English tradition for imitating Holbein pattern rugs that began with needlework copies of Elizabethan times. At 10 x 12 feet, this piece would make an ideal room-size decorative rug for an owner with a collector mentality, especially since Small Pattern Holbein rugs themselves were never made in so large a size. Yet to acquire this piece a collector would have get beyond the idea that this is not an authentic, original early Turkish carpet. But what rug has such authenticity. We now know that the small pattern Holbein carpets were themselves close adaptations of earlier and contemporary Timurid carpets produced in Iran.

And how about decorative rug clients? Would they see this for the impressively decorative work of art that it is, or would they consider it “not decorative” because the colors were too strong, or the design too bold and dense. In actuality this rug would make a spectacular anchor or focus of a well-designed interior carefully coordinated with the right furniture and upholstery, or perhaps even with Arts and Crafts furnishings. And if the client were inclined such Arts and Crafts taste, might they not also enjoy the idea that the piece exemplified the Movement’s penchant for historical allusion or reference?

In the end, this carpet appears neither collectible nor decorative simply because received opinion would judge it in this way. It is perhaps time that antique rug collectors as well as the clientele for the decorative rug market and the interior designers who serve them all broaden their horizons somewhat. Pidgeon-holing categorizations are supposed to help people, but in reality they do not, they only provide constraints. As things stand now, Nazmiyal 896 poses an interesting question – how good can any standard of judgment be that would fail to accommodate a rug of such charm, beauty, and interest?

The Nazmiyal shawl is a classic example of the so-called “Millefleurs” type, extremely fine in its detail and execution, and remarkably subtle in its design and use of color. The exhibition will be up until January 6, 2008.

The annual meeting of the International Conference on Oriental Carpets is always an exciting event, but when it is held in Istanbul, one of the most exotic and romantic cities in Europe, and a center of carpet production and commerce for the past five hundred years or more, ICOC is simply “carpet heaven.” I stayed in the lovely Sultanahment district, the oldest part of the Ottoman city, where there were a number of related exhibitions. The TIEM (Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi) mounted a spectacular show of early carpets from the Seljuk period, as well as various other oversize court carpets, Ushaks, etc. It was simply divine. The TIEM also put up an amazing selection of Ikats from the collection of Mehmet Cetinkaya. The Vakiflar Museum had two exhibitions of their incredible collection of early rugs as well, one on pile carpets, and one just for kilims. In conjunction with all this the Yildiz Palace held a memorial exhibition of kilims from the personal collection of the renowned expert Josephine Powell, who passed away last March.

However, wonderful all these official events may have been, the world-famous carpet dealers of Istanbul were not to be outdone. Understandably, there was a strong contingent of Turks at the Dealers’ Fair, but there were some Europeans and a few Americans as well. For me the high point here was the outstanding exhibition of Turkmen rugs presented by Seref Ozen of Istanbul’s Cocoon Gallery. For the really serious carpet enthusiasts, there was a wonderful program of lectures held at the Swiss Hotel, including a presentation by the pioneer scholar on Turkish village weaving and founder of Project DOBAG, Rainer Bohmer. What ever the nature of your interest in rugs, there was really something for everyone this year, and with the magic of Istanbul itself as the final ingredient, it was just about the best ICOC ever.

Rugs meant for a business environment will meet different requirements than those for use at home. A rug in a business setting is to some extent an expression of the image that the business seeks to project, so it may require something formal, reserved, or bold and playful; it all depends. But a rug for a place of business will need to stand up to considerable traffic,so it must above all be durable.

Such commercial needs will generally be met by new rugs, but certain types of business, those that seek to project tradition and refinement may require an antique Oriental carpet. Rugs for use at home must reflect the taste of the owner, and in a very profound and personal way, since they provide a constant feature or part of one’s private environment.

But here too, there are practical considerations.I the rug is needed for insulation or to absorb sound, a thicker, perhaps more coarsely woven rug may be required. If it is primarily intended as a home furnishing, a new rug may be the right way to go. If one is a rug enthusiast, it may may be worth the added expense to look for an antique.

One of the the more subjective aspects of judging a rug have to do with assessing its quality and its imperfections. When quality is assessed on the basis of the wool, dyes, and weaving technique, it is a fairly objective process. When the issue turns to drawing style, it becomes more of an issue of taste. The same is true with “imperfections.” Dropped knots, looseness or inconsistencies in tightness are technical imperfections. But are abrash – abrupt changes in color, sudden changes in design, or adjustments in proportion at the corners or the borders or ends of the field to be judged as imperfections, or as changes that are part of the deliberate intention of the weaver, and therefore part of her creative expression?

Some buyers may be put off by such qualities. They may prefer a workshop rug that is perfectly straight, with consistent color and design. But others will appreciate that the personality of the village weaver confronts us every time she inserts a willful twist and turn of color or pattern, or in her struggle to maintain straight proportions in a wool foundation, that that she is in a sense alive in the rug in all such variations or inconsistencies.

Focus, or accent?

Is this rug the focal point of my room, or an accent? Do I want you to walk into the room and have your eye go directly to the rug. If this is the criteria, then I am buying the rug, as I would any piece of art. The quality should be fine, and the design should be unique. Your furniture should have good lines, but the fabrics you use can be neutral. When the rug is the focus, you often want to pick it first, before the fabrics.

If I am looking for a rug to bring a room together, give it warmth, enhance the existing furniture then criteria is different. This choice is no less important than the focus rug. In some ways it is the more difficult rug to pick. It must be beautiful, but soft; it must complement, or increase the beauty of the rest of the room. When I buy a rug this way, I bring large enough swatches to put next to the rug. You will usually know which rugs will definitely not work. More likely, you will find several that you think will work. The next step will be to bring them into your home; most fine rug dealers will allow you to do this for you.The quality of the rug must equal to the other furnishings in the room.

Medallion, or open field?

The medallion rug is one with a definite design in the center of the rug; it is the focal point of the rug. An open field rug has an all over pattern in the center of the rug surrounded by a border. If I am looking for a rug that is going to sit under a coffee table or dining table, or a bed, I am not interested in a medallion rug. Why cover up the most important part of the rug? Then I am more interested in an open field rug. But, I want to find one that has a great border, the area that is going to get the most attention.

Any area, where the view of the rug is unobstructed , the choice is yours. It is often a good place to use a rug with a medallion.

Where to use a great runner?

If I have a large room that has multiple purposes, I may use a runner to act as a natural divider. A runner can direct traffic flow between to adjacent rooms. I may use a very narrow runner as a table decoration.

Prayer rug?

I can see using a prayer rug, if it is in good condition, in an entry way. It is a rug that goes in one direction, drawing your guests into your home. If I find one that cannot handle a lot of traffic but is really unique, and the design is very pleasing, I can always find a place on the wall for it.

The presence of a rug in a room can be a statement in itself, much like a piece of art on the wall. the choice to own a unique rug with a particular design, or weave says much about a person’s lifestyle, and sense of design.
A rug can be used to warm up a room. It can totally change the mood of a room. Whatever you reason to place a particular rug in a room, you are creating your own unique environment.
Enjoy!!