231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 100
“The original carpets were made in
Donegal and were horribly coarse,
so we’ve reinterpreted them.”
“There are three types of people who buy rugs,” says Bruce Lepere,
owner of Liberty Oriental Carpets, which is located in London’s iconic
emporium, Liberty of London. “The Ikea shoppers who want something
to cover their floor. The fashion-led types who think they need whatever
their interior designer says is trendy. And the individuals looking to buy
a piece of art. Those are my customers.”
We’re sitting in the wood-panelled dining room of The Windmill,
a classic Mayfair watering hole he has chosen partly because kilim rugs
cover the banquetes and partly because it serves excellent pies. A forkful
of steak and kidney has gone cold on its way to his mouth as he delivers
this speech, and the table is still shivering with the aftershock of the
slaps. This enthusiasm is typical of Bruce, a giant of a man who combines
35 years of rug-buying know-how with the fanaticism of a passionate
hobbyist. I know this because, as well as being one of Europe’s leading
experts on oriental carpets, he also happens to be my uncle.
As a child, his visits brought curious trinkets – camel knee pads, prayer
rugs, Moroccan slippers – and stories of buying missions to the Khyber
Pass, the knife-edge region where most people and goods cross between
Afghanistan and Pakistan. On one occasion, he was so determined to
buy an 1830 Beshire that he refused to back down, despite the negotiation
being conducted with a gun to his head. On another, a Pashtun trader
from Karkhanai Bazaar hid him while an anti-Western mob burned
European flags in the street.
Over the last decade, the rise of the Taliban has made the region too
dangerous for him to visit personally but he continues to deal with agents
whom he has worked with since he first joined Liberty’s as a fresh-faced
18-year-old.
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Although his specialism is antiques dating from 1850 to 1920,
Bruce worries about the craft of weaving dying out and occasionally
commissions limited-edition new collections. The most recent,
called ‘Arts and Crafts,’ features 19th-century designs from The Silver
Studio, an influential London-based practice founded by Arthur Silver
in 1880. During its peak in the early 20th-century, the studio created
more than 20,000 designs including those crafted by the titans of the
Arts & Crafts movement, Gavin Morton and Charles Francis Annesley
Voysey, and regularly held exhibitions on Conduit Street, just around
the corner from Liberty’s.
“The original carpets were made in Donegal and were horribly coarse,
so we’ve reinterpreted them. Although we’re remaking the designs almost
exactly, we’re working with a group of Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
They use finer yarn, which means they can increase the number of
knots, so the designs have more clarity,” says Bruce. “The aim is to create
the antiques of the future. I don’t mind new stuff per se, but it must be
significantly better than anything that’s already out there.”
If this sounds like a loaded comment, that’s because it is. As we move
on to coffee, Bruce confides how concerned he is about the future of the
craft. “When I started buying in Iran in the nineties, around seven million
people were involved in the carpet industry. Now I’d be surprised if it was
half a million.”
