Indian
Rugs Information
Passage to India
A traveler learns a thing or two about designing
a room around a rug.
By Michael Austin
http://www.northshoremag.com/cgi-bin/ns-article?article=/homegarden/11-05-india.html
In India, I learned recently, most often you experience
everything the country has to offer all at once: bus horns that
sound like trumpeting elephants, incense that floats on the hot,
dusty air, the brightest fluorescent saris you can imagine and food
that makes your tongue tingle long after you've finished eating.
India can't help itself, but you can slow things down and take them
one at a time when you are decorating a room.
Oscar Tatosian (with legal pad) inspects a rug with his agent, Suneil
Sikka (with arms behind back).
"Start from the bottom up," says Oscar Tatosian, who,
with his siblings, runs Oscar Isberian Rugs in Highland Park, Evanston
and Chicago. "Wall colors, furniture — those decisions
should all be made later."
Oscar recently returned from India on a buying trip that took him
up dust-choked, out-of-the way streets and down dried-up, pot-holed
back alleys. He was in search of rugs with brilliant designs or
just-right color combinations that he could ship home and sell in
the store his grandfather, Oscar Isberian, founded 85 years ago.
He was kind enough to let me tag along on his tab, and so I watched
him for hours upon hours, over the course of a week, as men in drapey
shirts rolled out rug after rug for his benefit.
Oscar would stand, legal pad in hand, with his weight shifted onto
one hip, twirling his finger as an indication for the Indian men
handling the rugs to show him the next one.
"OK, boys," he would say after each rug, in the same respectful
tone I had heard him using with his own rug flippers back home.
Wearing the casual Western business uniform of golf shirt, slacks
and dress shoes, Oscar climbed up aging stairways and through narrow
passages inside weaving facilities, and I followed him practically
every step of the way. Amid the cool comfort of gray concrete smoothed
by time and ceiling fans slowly spinning high overhead, we noticed
that the workers — some rolling balls of yarn the size of
basketballs, others snipping errant threads from rugs or moving
entire rows of knots to correct imperfections — were as interested
in us as we were in them. Their work ceased, or at least slowed
drastically, each time we entered a room (you can't work on a rug
when your eyes are glued to a foreigner), no matter how large or
tiny the room was. On the contrary, in one facility, a group of
women seated on the floor pulled brightly colored scarves over their
faces when they noticed us and continued their tasks.
We often walked from inside to outside, out into the stark sunlight
that always made us squint, and back inside again, into another
building on a facility's grounds. All day long we felt the sensations
of cool, hot, cool, hot, and I tried to keep up with the visual
stimulation before me: a rainbow of dyed wool drying in the sun
of a courtyard and teenage weavers bouncing on a bench while they
worked in rhythm to the sound of techno dance music. I sneezed often
over the course of the week because of the dander and dust kicked
up in the rug-making process. Along the way I learned a few things
about rugs and how they fit into the overall design of a room. First
of all, you can call them carpets, like the British do. They are
Persian rugs or carpets if they are made in the Persian style, which
is to say, classic, floral, and usually featuring lots of reds and
blues. They are Indian rugs or carpets if they are made in India.
But they are all Oriental rugs. I learned that there is a prejudice
in the Chicago area, and generally among consumers in the northeastern
portion of the United States, against florals. Oscar had strict
guidelines he was adhering to in his buying, and sometimes he would
announce this to the man in charge on one of our stops.
"No flowers," he would say, "no medallions."
A medallion refers to a single big design in the middle of a rug.
For the most part, folks around here don't go for those. Down in
Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, they eat them up.
At one showroom in Agra, just down the street from the Taj Mahal
(and let me just say that the Taj Mahal is among the very few sights
in the world that lives up to the hype), Oscar leaned over to me
and his India-based agent, Suneil, and quietly said, "I bring
this stuff home, they'll kill me."Suneil's job was to introduce
Oscar to rug makers. In cases where Oscar already knew a particular
rug maker, Suneil's job was to set up an appointment and make sure
Oscar found his way to it. Finding your way around India is a task
in itself, let alone doing it while all five of your senses are
being bombarded morning to night. And don't forget, as you've heard
from everyone who has ever been to India, that animals, especially
cows, share the roadways with pedestrians, bicyclists and motorized
vehicles.
At another showroom in Jaipur, with its city center that is painted
almost entirely pink, even Suneil knew the carpets we were looking
at wouldn't fly in Chicago.
"Too orange," Oscar said.
"That would work in the South," Suneil concurred.
"Florida," Oscar said.
Workers tea-wash a large rug as Tatosian (right) looks on.
"Kentucky, Nashville," said Suneil. They never lifted
their eyes from the flipping rugs below.
Oscar brought back dozens of light-colored rugs in the yellow/white
family. These rugs are not only light but also muted, with an antique
look to them. Real antiques, rugs made before 1900, can be prohibitively
expensive, but rug makers are able to give their brand-new rugs
a softer, aged look in the final washing process. This is what people
want, and have wanted for as long as Oscar can remember: light rugs
that look old.
"If I had to take a random sample of 100 carpets I've sold,
I'd say 50 percent of those would be ivory or cream-colored, 25
percent would be red, and the balance would be black, green and
blue. Black has never been popular, but now all of a sudden it is."
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Color comes second when choosing
a rug for your home. The first decision is about size.
"There are no real rules," Oscar says. "I think
people should be flexible about it. People think there's a right
size and a wrong size, and there really isn't. The only thing to
consider is, if a rug is too small it can shrink a room."
f you are planning on putting a rug under a dining room table, there's
one other size guideline to follow: Make sure the rug is large enough
so that all chairs remain on the rug when the chairs are pulled
out. But you should never feel like a rug has to reach out all the
way to the walls.
"You can let the floor show," he says. "These days
builders are doing the whole house in wood floors. It used to be
just the ground floor, and the upstairs would be done in plywood
and just get carpeted. Now homes have these beautiful wood floors
throughout."
Once you pick your size (standard sizes are 3 feet by 5 feet, 4-by-6,
6-by-9, 8-by-10, 9-by-12, 10-by-14, 12-by-15 and 12-by-18; custom
sizes offered by Isberian Rugs range from 1 foot by 1 foot to 35-by-35)
and shape — don't forget about the option of a round or oval
rug — you can start to narrow down your color choices. Do
you want to follow the trend of having light radiating up from your
floor, or do you want more color drawing the eye down? If you don't
have a clear idea, any rug dealer — Oscar or his chief competitors
on Chicago Avenue in Evanston, including Minasian and Eli Peer,
who mostly deals in antiques — will be happy to flip rugs
for you, just like the weavers did for us in the exotic backrooms
of India."Many people who come in have a good idea of what
they like," says Eli Peer, president of Eli Peer Oriental Rugs.
"They look around and see something, and they know that's what
they were looking for. But always you have to open a few more rugs,
definitely."
It's just part of the game, and as a consumer you should not feel
reticent to twirl your finger and say, "OK, boys." Very
quickly you will start to figure out what you like and what you
don't like, and with that information in mind, a rug merchant can
help you further focus your search. Once you've determined your
dominant color (maybe you like greens better than reds), you can
start to think about the intensity of color and then move to the
final consideration, rug pattern and design.
"I always ask, ŒDo you want your carpet to be background
music or do you want it to be center-stage?'" Oscar says. "ŒAnd
what volume do you want?'"
There were a few more things that Oscar was not looking for on his
India buying trip besides, "No flowers, no medallions."
I asked him to rattle off the remaining no-no's and, without hesitation,
he said: "No trees, no blue, no people, no animals."
That stuff just doesn't sell on the North Shore. Darker blues are
being replaced by black; distinct flowers, trees and animal depictions
usually don't sell as well as the more-subjective patterns.
Once you pick your rug, the rest of your room should follow, and
generally if your rug is traditional or classic it will give you
more license to be daring with your wall colors, furniture and window
treatments. If you pick a contemporary rug or commission a modern,
high-energy design of your own, you might choose to tone down the
rest of the room in order to let your floor art shine. If you are
convinced you want baroque furniture, maybe a more subtle rug is
in order.
"Think of it like dressing yourself," Oscar says. "If
you've got a striped shirt on, you're probably going to want to
wear solid pants. It's kind of a simplistic way of looking at it,
but you've got to start somewhere."
Since brown is the new black, could brown rugs be far off?
"My experience with a lot of interior designers is, they like
to see something unexpected in a room, whatever it is," Oscar
says. "They use a lot of surprise, and they mix it up."
This may be part of the reason that non-traditional and custom rugs
are gaining in popularity. In Agra, after a rug maker had rolled
out his finest traditional offerings, he unfurled a few non-traditional
rugs, including one sporting a Union Jack design, a nod to the British
colonization of India.
"Contemporary rugs are growing big-time," says Oscar,
who has seen an increase in not only non-traditional designs, but
also non-traditional fabrics, including sisal and leather. The bottom
line is, when you pick a rug, you should pick it because you like
the rug, period. Think of it as a piece of artwork and remember
that it was woven two inches per day and probably took six months
to complete. Think of the rug as the foundation, or as Oscar says,
start from the bottom up.
By the way, that means your ceiling would come last, and here's
a tip for you: If you paint your ceiling in a very light blue instead
of white, it gives it a lifting effect and makes it appear higher
than it is. Nine times out of 10, if you ask a person to tell you
what color your light-blue ceiling is, they'll say white. I did
it myself, based on a tip from a designer, and I'm amazed every
time I ask someone what color my ceiling is. They almost all think
it's white.
So there you have it, light coming up from the floor with the light
carpet (if you are of that camp), and light going up through the
ceiling with the subtle blue paint job.
One last tip: Remember, Oscar was talking about designing —
not doing — when he said to start from the bottom up. Make
sure you paint that ceiling before you lay down your precious rug.And
do yourself a favor: Go to India.
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