The Carpet Man

By Imogen Lepere

1 Year Ago

“ Oriental carpets … typically cost around £5000, hardly surprising as they can take months or even years to craft.”

“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. 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 & Craft 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.

The culprit? Knock-off versions made in India and China for a fraction of the cost and sold in retail behemoths for as little as £100. By contrast, handmade Oriental carpets (from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and Morocco) typically cost around £5000, hardly surprising as they can take months or even years to craft. The labour is often performed by women from nomadic tribes in their own homes. Every stage is completed without machinery, from dying the wool with natural pigments like pomegranate peel, to spinning it into yarn fine enough to eventually form the millions of knots that make up a finished design. Although there are repeated motifs – tear-drop-shaped boteh, many-layered rosettes, octagonal guls – no two pieces are ever the same due to their artisanal nature.

“It isn’t just the world of makers that has changed beyond recognition either. I’m one of a handful of buyers left in the UK who follows their intuition and picks every piece by hand,” Bruce shouts above the noise of Regent’s Street. “My customers come to me because they know they’re going to get an informed opinion. They don’t have to like it, but they’re definitely going to get one.”

Liberty of London’s mock Tudor façade, complete with beams from two warships, rises like a daydream above the neat Georgian buildings of Great Marlborough Street. Founded in 1875 by Arthur Lasenby Liberty, the emporium originally existed to bring Londoners luxurious objets d’art and fabrics from the Orient. The East, as a symbol of both lavishness and lasciviousness, cropped up throughout literature in the 19th-century, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan to the opium dens of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Liberty’s collection quickly won the imaginations – and purses – of Victorian Londoners intoxicated by the exotic.

When we enter Bruce’s fourth-floor wunderkammer, central London melts away and it feels as if we’re in a souk. The walls, ceilings and windows are covered in curious, colourful rugs and objects that whisper of far-flung places. Every piece is made by hand and as Bruce points out various treasures – a fluffy Turkish tulu, camel coverings from Turkmenistan, a net-like spoon holder made by Qashqai nomads – I imagine I can feel the presence of each artisan there in the shop.

Although the Liberty family still owned the shop when Bruce joined in 1988, it was bought in 2010 by private equity firm, BlueGem. It’s now largely owned by another private equity group led by Glendower Capital, who purchased their controlling stake in 2019 for £300 million. Although he’d been running it since 2000, Bruce purchased the department in 2007 with a loan from a friend who remains a shareholder. In many ways, his fiercely independent ethos feels much aligned to Arthur Lasenby Liberty’s vision.

Bruce’s first job was in the warehouse and it was here he met Ron Stewart who ran the oriental rugs and textiles department between 1989 and 2000, and whom Bruce describes as a “carpet guru,” saying: “I got talking to Ron one day as I was giving him a hand with a delivery. He took a liking to me and suggested I come work for him, so I did.” This fateful meeting ignited Bruce’s passion and allowed him to form relationships with tribes and traders from the Atlas Mountains to the Hindu Kush. The two remained friends until Stewart died in 2022.

“Ron wasn’t interested in trends and neither am I. Trends destroy quality as well as tradition, which is the really sad part,” Bruce says, citing the rise of Berber rugs from Morocco. Before 2020, he used to sell 600 of these pieces every month but he refused to stock them when high street retailers entered the market. “They were mostly selling knock-offs made in India… H&M was doing some with printed designs rather than woven, for God’s sake. Now the trend has moved on, the original Moroccan weavers are left with nothing because their ancestral product has been completely devalued.”

Back on the fourth floor, we stand in front of an exceptionally rare silk from Keshan, Iran, with a price tag of £78,000. The intricate design represents an Islamic garden. A central medallion suggesting a lake is surrounded by a constellation of flowers in peach and blue. Bruce tells me it’s from 1900, which he knows because certain dyes have oxidised over time. “That isn’t wear and tear by the way, kid,” he grins. “That’s how you know you’re dealing with the cream of the crop.”

So, who buys these treasures? Customers range from the shipping magnate who continues to buy houses for each member of his family and staff and asks Bruce to furnish every one, to the teacher who recently purchased a set of Moroccan mint tea glasses for £35. What they all share is confidence and a love of travel. “They’re drawn to the quirkiness of the whole operation and know that beautiful things enrich their lives.” The ‘whole operation’ includes Rabia Khan, Illir Lleshi and Matthew Wilson, who have been running around constantly throughout our visit looking after customers. A new range of bags and purses made in Uzbekistan is proving particularly popular, while an Arabic man has been making detailed enquiries about the Keshan silk. In the brief hiatus between the afternoon and after-work rush, the team perches on the piles of rugs that teeter around the shop. I ask how they would sum up their approach.

“I think for me it’s mostly about inspiration,” says Khan, a Burmese-Afghan born in Yorkshire, who has worked at Liberty’s since 1989. “I’ve fallen madly in love with rugs over the years and I think customers enjoy that passion.” “I never try to sell anything,” says Wilson, an actor by trade who has worked at Liberty Oriental Carpets for 15 years. “I ask the customer about themselves – their life story, colour palette and style – and then help them think about their space in a new way.”

A recent report from the Centre for Retail Research shows that 17,000 high street shops closed in 2022, an average of 47 per day. One imagines that figure will only increase given today’s unpromising financial climate. So, is Bruce worried? “Times are tough, but I think the specialists will survive. My knowledge is my protection, it’s what gives us our edge. Thankfully there are a lot of people who want to live amongst art. Why shouldn’t that include their floors as well as their walls?”