Striking & Versatile Berber Carpets

Moroccan carpets have a vibrant quality, which gives a 'life force' and vitality to any interior, we become aware of the maker, the designer communicates with those who look at her art.  Messages and her personality are literally weaved into the rug. It can take more than a year for a weaver to create a rug. Usually a Berber woman works on a rug for about 2 hours a day, as it can be difficult on her eyes. Often the rug is kept in their home for many, many years and sold when the family needs some extra money. The rug is well cherished, the creator aware of its value, but happy to release it for the world to appreciate, like a precious work of art.

Berber carpets do not fit the stereotype of African art. These rectangular compositions woven by Moroccan women are religious works designed to repel negative spiritual powers. Also, like African sculpture, they influenced such masters of modernism as Matisse and Klee, and played a key role in interiors designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, and Charles and Ray Eames. To Modernism's pared-down interiors and abstract art, the restrained markings and subtle colour shifts on luxurious, deep-pile woollen Berber carpets imparted human warmth and the trace of the human hand.

For their nomadic makers, however, the carpets provided physical and metaphysical protection. Carpets served as blankets, shielding Berber families against the elements, while their talismanic designs deflected evil and promoted fertility. These mystical intentions perhaps explain the surprising asymmetries of Berber designs, as if the lines were themselves nomadic, open to chance meanders and deviations, like the paths and folds of Atlas landscapes. Monochrome carpets, on the other hand, yield the subtle pleasures of a Mark Rothko painting, also meditative and, for many, transcendental. Such freedom of design, far removed from the repetitive patterns of urban carpets, strikes a chord with Berber identity. The tribes of the Middle Atlas speak Tamazight, literally "the language of the free," and their tribe names can be equally evocative-one translates as "people   from between somewhere and nowhere". Their designs seem to similarly hover between being and dissolving. With their hand spun wool and authentic indigenous character, these one-of-a-kind rugs have an organic quality not found in factory made counterparts from other parts of the world

The colours of North Africa have been celebrated for centuries by well known artists from the west - Delacroix, Matisse,  and Klee . Somewhat less widely known but no less significant is the historic connection between Moroccan art, and rugs in particular, and 20th century western design. From Europe and the Bauhaus to 1960's and 70s American designers like Billy Baldwin, the simple geometric patterns of Moroccan carpets have long been used to enhance sophisticated modern furnishings and interiors. Pile carpets from the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco can be found in well known historic houses such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Charles and Ray Eames Pacific Palisades house in California. The late 1990's brought about a renewed appreciation for mid-century modernism as well as elements of sixties and seventies style and color. The brightness and warmth of oranges and saffron yellows in Morocco's High Atlas rugs or the neutral beige  Beni Ouarain rugs, (their thick pile sometimes reminiscent of sixties shag), are still being utilized in contemporary interiors. They have a timeless quality whether they are 50 or 100 years old, there is nothing dated about them, they will live on and on.