DONT’T TREAD ON ME : SOME OF THE MOST EXQUISITE RUGS ARE NO LONGER UNDERFOOT. PLACEMENT HANGS ON THEIR AGE, DELICACY AND BEAUTY.

If Persian, Turkish and other “Oriental” rugs are so beautiful, why hide them under a table? Why walk on them all day? Why not put them where people can see them--at eye level, or higher?

Aficionados of the elaborate rugs often do just that. After all, in Islamic tradition, many of these rugs are considered gateways to heaven. Why not start off a little closer?

“I have a silk prayer rug, and not being Muslim, I wouldn’t use it for its intended purpose,” explained Keith Calandro of Lake Forest. “But the detail on it is very intricate and beautiful. It looks a lot like a tapestry, and tapestries are for walls.”

Calandro hung the rug and put a spotlight on it.

“Now it’s a focal point--much more so on the wall than it would have been on the floor,” he said.

Calandro lives in a trilevel Lake Forest townhouse with high ceilings. The rug was a gift from his parents, who purchased it in Turkey in 1983. He has other Asian rugs, but none that he feels deserve such prominent display.

Ahmad A., an Iranian living in Tustin, has rugs all over his floors, but also two adjoining each other on the walls. (Because of the rugs’ value, he preferred that his last name not be used.)

“You don’t put these carpets on the floors,” Ahmad said. “They are so fine, so delicate. Rugs for the floor are heavier. Those you can vacuum.”

Rugs as wall hangings have even made the crossover to those usual bastions of blandness, the dentist’s office. The Persian kilim saddle-covering at the practice of Cherilyn Sheets and Jacinthe Paquette in Newport Center dates from the 1890s. (A kilim is a flat-woven rug, a rug without a knotted pile.)

“When a rug gets very old and is still in good condition, you don’t want to hurt it anymore,” noted Manny Yeroushalmi of Persian Treasure Rugs in Corona del Mar. “You hang it on the wall.”

Age, delicacy, pictorial beauty--all are perfect reasons for hanging a rug.

The doctors used a 2-by-3-foot, wood-and-glass shadow box for their small kilim. Ahmad employed a system of thread, wood and nails for his 3-by-6 rugs. (Never drive a nail through the rug.)

Calandro bought a decorative curtain rod at Bombay Co., an antique-inspired furniture accessory shop in Costa Mesa; his parents had had loops sewn onto the back of the 3-by-5 carpet at a rug shop in their native Louisiana.

Other methods for hanging include carpet gripper, curtain tapes and Perspex.

If customers buy a rug from Yeroushalmi, he’ll hang it at no extra charge. In addition to the other methods, he suggests framing rugs like any other piece of art. He keeps a stock of sample rug frames in both plastic and wood.

Even if it’s not free, hanging the rugs doesn’t have to be expensive: Calandro spent about $25 for his curtain rod, and the loops cost his parents about $30. He couldn’t remember where he’d first seen a hanging rug, but, he noted, “it’s not my original idea . . . I’m not a decorator.”

That he’s not. Several well-known professional decorators said they wouldn’t consider hanging rugs themselves and knew of no one else in their field doing it either.

“Not really, maybe in Morocco,” said Nicole Roberts at Carole Eichen Interiors in Santa Ana.

“I don’t do it, and I really can’t think of anybody who does,” said Hilary Imes of Newport Beach.

“Not that I can think of,” confirmed Paul Vidales, a designer at Corona del Mar’s Jan Turner Hering Interior Design. “I’ve seen it in older interior design books--it was very common in the mid-’70s. We’ve taken antique tapestries and had them museum mounted and framed, but never Persian or Bukhara rugs.”

There are exceptions: Marian Paquette of Le Decor in Costa Mesa, who framed the kilim in sister Jacinthe’s dental office, says she’s hung rugs in half a dozen homes.

“Many people prefer an ethnic look, so we do something ethnic,” Marian Paquette said. “Some of these designers are doing what they like, not what the client wants. You see the home and you say, ‘Oh, this is so-and-so’s look.’ ”

Alastair Hull and Nicholas Barnard devote an entire chapter to “Kilims on the Wall”--location, positioning and methods of hanging--in their 1988 book, “Living With Kilims” (C.N. Potter of New York).

They note that strong, natural light will fade the dyes and that the rugs should not be hung over a heat source, which makes the weave brittle and colors dull. They advise against hanging a kilim against a patterned paint or wallpaper surface and recommend instead white or off-white.

Alcoves are an ideal focus or frame for a rug on the wall, especially if there’s hidden lighting. Rugs can lengthen or foreshorten hallways, depending on how they’re hung. A kilim does not even have to lie flat but can cascade from the wall onto the floor, a table or a chest.

In the Middle East, the idea of hanging rugs is as old as Mohammed, and it continues to be common practice in the Middle East.

“In the West, we use more paintings on the walls,” explained Jalal Neishabouri, manager of Kismet Rug Gallery in Corona del Mar. “In the Middle East, they don’t use many paintings. Or, you might say, their paintings are woven. Since they appreciate rugs, they have them framed and hang them.”

Yeroushalmi agreed. “It’s like art: You can use them everywhere,” he said. “If you can put a painting on the wall, you can put a rug on the wall. A lot of times customers use them above the fireplace. If it’s a big house, they put them in the entryway--two, one on each side of the door.”

Neishabouri and Yeroushalmi agree that Middle Easterners go for more pictorial rugs, while Westerners seem to favor patterns. Rugs nice enough to hang can be found for as little as a couple of hundred dollars; at the high end, the sky’s the limit.

Walter B. Denny, professor of Islamic art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, has a half dozen rugs hanging in his home. According to Denny, certain kinds of rugs seem clearly designed to be hung as decorations, rather than for use on floors.

“In the nomadic tents, rugs will be used on the walls as well as on tabletops and for bags,” Denny said. “Prayer rugs, in which the niche [design] recalls the arches, serve as a surrogate for the mosque and are definitely more likely to be hung. Big kilims, if you’ve got a high enough ceiling, are just spectacular. They certainly shouldn’t be put on the floor, they’re so fragile. Especially when you’ve just paid $30,000 for them.”

Added Denny, “I’ve been hanging rugs on walls for years, especially the small ones. I would never put an antique rug on the floor, not when there’s two dogs and a kid. Maybe once a year.”