Called to the Carpet
As one approaches Jim Dixon’s Sonoma County house, the twisting, uphill road narrows to wind through towering redwoods so densely packed that the noontime light seems like evening. Beyond the intimacy of the virgin forest, a brilliant panorama of rolling hills, cloudless blue skies and the shimmering ocean declare this a place apart.
Dixon’s 4,500-square-foot house 10 miles north of Bodega Bay, surrounded by a profusion of gardens, was built to appreciate its natural setting, and not to celebrate itself. Strains of a Bach fugue echo from inside, yet nothing prepares the visitor for the grandeur of Dixon’s meditation on Oriental rugs. His devotion to the art form has led him to cover not only every available floor space, but also to hang rugs on walls like paintings, to drape furniture with them, and even to cover some ceilings.
With cathedral ceilings soaring four stories high, the combination of airy, open space and colorful rare antique rugs can leave a visitor speechless. “Don’t try to talk for a while,” Dixon says to a first-time guest. “Just take it all in and see what you feel.”
The landscape designer and longtime rug collector, who also lives in Kensington, near Berkeley, designed and built this undoubtedly singular retreat himself, primarily to display his rug collection. “I wanted to provide a carefully proportioned volume of space,” says the 57-year-old, his oversized handlebar mustache shielding his smooth, expressive face, “so that the impact will bring the mind to a stop and allow us to transcend our worldly tensions.”
Dixon’s 700-piece collection reflects passion, not wealth. A collector for 30 years, he started out by limiting his budget to a couple thousand dollars each year, and he still gets nervous when he has to spend more than $4,000 for a rug--in fact, he’s gone over that limit for only about 5% of his collection, he says. He has driven his battered 1989 Toyota pickup for more than 200,000 miles, and though his house is comfortable, apart from the rugs, it is sparsely furnished.
Yet with prized pieces such as a 15th century Turkish medallion Ushak carpet measuring 14 by 24 feet, Dixon’s collection required extraordinarily large walls. Windows needed to be placed carefully so direct sunlight did not strike the carpets. The house’s design is centered around a main gallery-like living space, a four-story room, illuminated by a central clerestory, surrounded by four side alcoves.
Polished copper moldings extend from floor to ceiling and around the top of each alcove and the entire clerestory, reflecting light throughout the house. North and south wings at either end of the main hall provide two separate sets of living quarters. Dixon lives in one wing; a tenant occupies the other.
Dixon’s music room, with more than 2,000 classical recordings on vinyl albums, is on the second floor, overlooking the main hall. From a roof-deck perch, he can see his entire 18-acre property, and his extensive gardens reveal how close the vibrant colors of the flowers are to the rich, vegetal hues of his rugs.
Dixon has been creating gardens since he was 8, and with this house, which was completed about a year ago, he is realizing a lifelong dream.
He plans to terrace the long sloping hillside in front of the house, eventually cultivating four full acres. As with textiles, he has no formal training in landscape architecture but nevertheless has informally taught the subject and become a respected and busy Bay Area designer. “The gardens will be the thing that this house is known for,” says Dixon, who sees a direct connection between his passions.
For now, however, it’s the carpets that make this house notable.
“Jim’s is a major collection and a very important one,” says antique carpet expert Murray L. Eiland, author of “Oriental Carpets: A Complete Guide” (Bulfinch Press), the fourth edition of which came out in 1998. Eiland recently cataloged Dixon’s rugs. “Jim has focused on the oldest rugs he can find. Authenticity is the key thing with him.”
In the field of antique carpets, Eiland says, “we’re all self-taught. There is no place to get a degree or formal training.” Eiland marvels at Dixon’s devotion to the medium, and calls his judgment about what is old “as good as anybody’s.”
Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Last April, some 250 rug aficionados from the Fifth American Conference on Oriental Rugs in San Francisco made the two-hour pilgrimage to Dixon’s house. For most, the experience was worth the trip, Dixon said, even for enthusiasts who have spent decades hunting down rare Oriental rugs. Still, the poor or fragmentary condition of many of the rugs put off some fellow “ruggies.” Dixon says he overhead one woman say, “I don’t know why we had to be brought way up here to see all these rags,” a comment that still makes him chuckle.
“Jim is simply not as concerned with their condition as he is with their age,” says Eiland. Plenty of wealthy individuals around the world can afford to collect only masterpieces, says Eiland. Dixon buys what he can afford. Fortunately for him, when he started collecting, even historically important rugs were relatively cheap.
In the late 1970s, for example, a friend once convinced Dixon to come with her to a friend’s house to look at some embroideries with the lure that there might also be a rug for sale. He went along and paid just $700 for an 18th century Mujur (Turkish) prayer rug, identical to one depicted at the time in a show at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, he believes, that rug is valued at $4,000 to $18,000. And as Dixon was leaving with his purchase, a large St. Bernard dog got up from its berth to reveal a rare Imreli (a Turkmenistan tribe) carpet. Dixon bought that one too--he won’t say for how much--then later traded it, and that rug wound up in an exhibition at the Textile Museum a few years later.
One of Dixon’s fragments consists of one-fourth of a 17th century Persian garden carpet. Another quarter is in a Tehran museum, and the remaining half is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Another garden carpet, probably from the 16th century, contains a rare combination of red silk and wool. Eiland describes a large, lustrous Beshir rug (from Turkmenistan) as “the top of its class.”
Dixon’s rugs represent the entire traditional Oriental weaving world, from Turkey in the west, across the Caucasus Mountains and Iran all the way to China. Throughout his house, he has arranged the rugs thematically. The walls of the master bedroom display a striking group of Caucasian rugs in the same basic style but spanning an entire century. Grouped together, they reveal the design evolution--from early complexity to later simplicity--of this major weaving area.
Dixon’s focus is on rugs that appear to predate 1850, before the great commercial outpouring of rugs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that has become popular with collectors today. Eiland calls them “precursor” rugs, “closer to the original inspiration of any given design.” For example, one Caucasian Kazak rug contains a rarely seen, archaic animal head motif. Scholars believe this design evolved over time into the popular “hook” pattern common in later 19th century rugs.
Many of Dixon’s rugs contain medallions and other patterns that he believes are bird’s-eye views of gardens. “The center of this rug is a tree of life design,” he points out, “but as seen from directly above. The designs in the medallions are the gardens radiating out from the tree.”
Love for Art Superseded Science
Growing up in small-town Nebraska, Dixon intended to study science when a Westinghouse scholarship for chemistry took him to Ohio Wesleyan. But plans changed. “I just couldn’t keep suppressing my interest in art and literature,” he says. He dropped out and moved to California and earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and English literature at UC Berkeley. In and out of school because it “interfered with my opportunity to study,” Dixon later received a master’s degree in humanities and classical Greek language and literature from San Francisco State. One friend remembers that Dixon was required to take an admission exam and that when the results came back, the school asked him to join the faculty.
When Dixon began collecting rugs, he was living in an attic in a shabby part of Oakland. Tom Weisbuch, a longtime friend and Bay Area rug and antiques dealer, recalls bumping his head on the attic ceiling while looking at rugs. “I was actually really poor for a long time,” Dixon says. For 25 years, he has fed his “rug bug” by using “all my money beyond bare living expenses to buy rugs” and, eventually, to build a sanctuary in which to display them.
Dixon says his inspiration for collecting is a fascination with the carpets as religious art and an appreciation of Islamic culture as expressed in the designs. Surrounded by the vivid garden designs in the rugs, and the actual gardens outside, the house is Dixon’s meditative refuge where he says he can sit “quietly, catatonically and empty myself out.”
Sharing the house’s transcendent experience is one of Dixon’s goals. He believes precious objects of historical significance should not be hoarded, but should be preserved and shared. “Otherwise, why not hide away bars of gold?” he asks.