Magic Carpet Ride
A tour of L.A.’s best-known oriental rug gallery offers more than an opportunity to ogle great works of art-an antique Persian Tabriz, for example, or a Turkish Oushak. Step inside the Melrose Avenue shop and you’ll get a crash course on cutthroat competition. Hanging between those $50,000 objects of desire is a brand new rug, woven by Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. Its mix of traditional patterns and soft, modern colors stands out in a room full of classic carpets. But don’t ask where it came from.
“It’s nobody’s business where I get my rugs,” says the owner of the Mansour gallery. He won’t name names and dismisses his suppliers “as mostly pickers without enough capital.” Nonetheless, he has tried to corner the Los Angeles market for their rugs. And he has company.
The “pickers”-brothers Zabi and Zubair Ahmadi-have been selling their carpets across the country as quickly as they can produce them. They’ve even moved into a storefront on Robertson Boulevard, just around the corner from Mansour. It’s a space where dozens of the Ahmadis’ signature rugs-distinguished by a short pile, lustrous wool and light colors with an antique patina-are stacked against the walls. “Sometimes when dealers come by to see our new shop, they don’t believe it’s us,” says Zubair, recalling their days dealing antique rugs in a low-rent hole in the wall on La Cienega Boulevard. “They expect to see an older guy here with us.” At 26, Zubair shrugs off that the brothers are a generation younger than their peers. “They couldn’t see that we were capable of this. Some of them put the word out that we would not make it.” Almost no one outside the insular Los Angeles rug world knows about the Ahmadis. They started out working the edges of the local market as menders and small-time traders, currying favor with many retailers in L.A.’s prime rug district--La Cienega Boulevard between Santa Monica Boulevard to the north and 3rd Street to the south, bounded by Melrose Place to the east and the Pacific Design Center to the west, with many shops on Melrose and Robertson. The brothers rose within this usually impenetrable world because of their knot-by-knot knowledge of rugs, sidestepping the deception and aggressive haggling that can define L.A. rug dealing. Their expertise has enabled them to build their new rug business and thrive as antique dealers in the face of big-time competitors-shops such as Mansour, Aga John and Caravan Rug Corp.-that dominate the rug trade with gigantic inventories and bank accounts to carry them.
Sixteen years after arriving in Los Angeles, the brothers have transformed themselves from penniless Afghan immigrants into international businessmen who have manufactured carpets in Pakistan and, now, in Afghanistan. But they have more than a business at stake. They dream of reclaiming a heritage.
With dozens of world-class shops, Los Angeles is arguably the world’s third-largest market for antique decorative rugs, behind New York and London. The local business was once the province of Armenian dealers until the influx of Persians into L.A. before the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now Persian businessmen dominate the market. On busy days at large emporiums such as Caravan on Wilshire near Robertson or Aga John in the Pacific Design Center, where new carpets are priced by the square foot, the shops look more like freight yards than galleries. Laborers scurry around with dollies amid the overpowering smell and dust from the wool, turning over stack after stack of big rugs for designers and hauling them off in vans for “tryouts.” The L.A. rug market, dealers say, is driven by interior designers who want only the pattern du jour. Carpets are selected more for their color and size-”fabric for the floor” that can be changed like drapes, says one designer-and less for authenticity or quality. Pricing policies are fuzzy; in fact, at mid-size and smaller retail shops, the carpets rarely carry price tags. Retail customers in these smaller stores often hear, “Tell me what you are looking for because I have many more carpets in the warehouse.” This is L.A. “rug-speak” for the backdoor networking that dealers do among themselves, sharing the profits as rugs are shifted from shop to shop in search of buyers.
But dealers have been known to fight over customers as well. One L.A. shopper looking for a particular size and color left a store on Robertson only to be followed by the dealer to another stop on La Cienega. There the two dealers argued in Farsi over who “owned” the customer. In some cases, such routine arguments have festered into bitter rivalries. Rumor has it that competition in a few cases became so intense that there were threats of violence by one dealer against another.
Zabi and Zubair Ahmadi first learned about rugs at their grandfather’s carpet factory, which opened in Kabul in 1919. At its peak in the early 1980s, the factory employed more than 100 workers who manned 50 looms to create silk rugs for the European market. All of the Ahmadi children grew up weaving. “We made a copy of the Pazyryk carpet [the oldest surviving knotted pile carpet on record, dating from 300 to 500 BC] when we were kids,” says Zubair-a challenge for adults, let alone children.
When the Ahmadi family left Afghanistan 19 years ago, patriarch Ghulam Ahmadi knew nothing about L.A.’ s rug market or that he would bring his family here. His only concern was getting his 10 children, ages 5 to 20, away from the Soviet soldiers who were occupying their country. He joined a group of about 100 other refugees heading for the Pakistani border. “The government wanted all people to become Communists,” says Ghulam, 66, then a high-ranking government agricultural scientist who had studied in Texas and maintained his American contacts. “I did not agree, and I saw that if I didn’t leave I would be in jail. “We could not take anything, not even scraps of paper in our pockets, because they would arrest anyone they thought was leaving.” Except for a few photographs saved by an aunt who stayed behind, the family has little by which to remember their comfortable life in Kabul.
The journey to the Pakistani border, usually a day’s drive from Kabul, took about three weeks. The night they grew close to the border, battle flares lighted the night sky and the ground shook as Soviet helicopter gunships fired rockets nearby. Hearing the explosions, the Ahmadis fled their truck. Their driver, moving without lights on a bright, moonlit night, hid the vehicle in a ditch. The next morning the family learned that two truckloads of families ahead of them had been killed. Once in Pakistan, with the family jammed into a small apartment in sweltering Islamabad, the Ahmadis survived as rug menders, accepting repair jobs from local merchants. For Zabi, now 30, it was the end of childhood. “There was no school for us,” he says. “There was nothing else for us to do.” Two years later, in 1986, the family arrived in the San Fernando Valley with only $500.
Zabi felt like an outsider in school and found a place to belong alongside his cousins Ahmad and Alex Ahmadi, repairing rugs and later working part time at their rug shop on La Cienega. As his cousins rose in prominence, Zabi learned about antiques and the Los Angeles rug world while doing mostly menial chores. The cousins now operate a high-end shop, Ariana Rugs on Melrose Place, where two other prominent stores are located: the Raymond Benardout Gallery, operated by L.A.’s most celebrated antique rug and textile dealer, and J. Iloulian Rugs. Zabi eventually wanted his own business as well. After six years of working in his cousins’ store, he and Zubair opened a one-room shop in 1995 on La Cienega near Santa Monica Boulevard. The brothers were then 23 and 18. They hung the one rug they owned on the wall and put the only other rug in their inventory, a repair job, on the floor.
They made a living repairing and wholesaling antique rugs to L.A. dealers, living at home with their parents and most of their siblings. Zabi scoured Santa Barbara, Boston, New York, Paris-anywhere he could make friends with carpet traders. This searching for rugs at wholesale prices by “runners” or “pickers” (Zabi finds the latter term derogatory) is a key part of the business. Zabi would offer his finds to dealers and the occasional collector cruising La Cienega. Drawing on their experience as repairers, the brothers developed a knack for finding and restoring battered, inexpensive rugs that other dealers thought too damaged to sell. Over the years, as they sold more carpets to dealers at wholesale prices, the Ahmadis’ open, soft-spoken manner earned them entrance to the dealers’ “club.” “Compared to many people in the rug business, they are never argumentative or aggressive,” says Raymond Benardout. “And they are absolutely honest.” But as both outsiders and small operators, the Ahmadis often found themselves squeezed by the larger retailers. Dealing exclusively in antiques was another problem in the designer-driven L.A. market with its preference for new rugs. To thrive, the Ahmadis needed more rugs-a steady stream of rugs.
“When I made my first trip to Pakistan in 1997, I was thinking we might make new rugs, but I just went to look around,” says Zabi. While in the rug market in Peshawar, a bustling rug center created by the influx of thousands of Afghan refugee weavers, Zabi encountered one of the men who had helped run his family’s rug factory in Kabul. “I grew up with this guy and I had confidence in him,” says Zabi. “When we started talking about making new rugs, he said he would do it with me.” That first trip to Pakistan became a monthlong sojourn, with Zabi buying wool, setting up looms and managing the production process. The Ahmadi weavers craft their new rugs in the traditional centuries-old way, using hand-spun wool and mostly natural dyes. They are part of a revival of carpet weaving abandoned in the late 1800s and replaced by “modern” European methods using machine-spun wool and chemical dyes. Emmett Eiland, author of “Oriental Rugs Today: A Guide to the Best in New Carpets From the East,” calls the return to the old ways a “renaissance.” Now, in addition to their antique rug trade, the Ahmadi weavers produce about 600 to 700 square feet of carpet per month, some 100 pieces ranging in size from 4 feet by 6 feet to 16 feet by 25 feet.
It was difficult running a business in Pakistan, and the brothers say the turmoil in the region forced them to cut production by 40%. But the establishment of operations there had a side benefit: In Peshawar, family friends introduced Zabi to Lina Noori, who, after a three-year courtship, moved to Los Angeles last year for their wedding.
On a recent Saturday, Zubair Ahmadi warmly greets a local dealer who has stopped by the shop, now called Amadi Gallery, to see a shipment of new arrivals. Speaking in Dari, a common language of Afghanistan, Zubair offers the traditional cup of tea. He is building a loom for the storefront and shows the dealer skeins of the soft, hand-spun yarn the brothers use in their carpets. When fully assembled, and with the weaving of a rug in progress, visitors will be able to see the exact process of making a knotted pile rug. “We are not just dealers. We are weavers,” Zubair says. “We were born in this business. As soon as we were old enough to hold a tool, we learned to weave.” Today the brothers’ eight siblings, including Murtaza and Wahid, help in the family enterprise.
With dreams of a stable Afghanistan, the Ahmadi brothers are finally in the process of moving their production back home-to Kabul. When the move is complete, their plan is to close the Pakistan operation. Even though they have spent more of their lives in America and consider Los Angeles their home, “Afghanistan is our soil,” says Zubair. “We would rather spend our money in Afghanistan than Pakistan. Imagine if all the business people who left Afghanistan started doing business there again. We could make a difference.” In the meantime, the Ahmadi brothers will continue to face the challenges of entrepreneurship. In the rug community, day-to-day gentility prevails despite the tension of competition. Dealers will frequently visit one another, often without notice. An owner may greet a rival at the back door with offers of tea sweetened with sugar cubes-but that’s where the sweetness ends. “One dealer here in Los Angeles offered to buy everything we produce,” says Zabi. He flashes a quick smile. “He even wanted us to ship the rugs to his place directly.” The Ahmadis declined the offer.
