Rug Star – perfect Carpet Craft and Unusual Design
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„A carpet from Rug Star is something alive, with a soul, not an uninspired industrial product,“ says Jürgen Dahlmanns, head of the successful carpet workshop in Berlin. The designs that he creates in Berlin for wool and silk carpets receive their shape and soul in Nepal, there where, as we in the West believe, people have always been more inspired - perhaps because they are closer to the heavens than in the district of Mitte in Berlin.
Carpet Craft from Nepal
The bad reputation of the carpet industry, the accusations of inhuman working conditions do not apply here. In Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley, where Dahlmanns himself lives for some weeks a year, he has created an environment which offers a light, airy workplace and health care to the 400 Tibetans and Newari who work there - and to their children, instead of work, a school and day-care centre. The weavers come from the villages in the mountains where carpets have been knotted for centuries. For Rug Star they work in teams of four on the large carpets, for 3,000 to 4,000 hours, over a period of ten weeks.Then these „gems“ are finished and are sent to all corners of the world, for Dahlmanns has dealers in 15 countries. What they get is, on the one hand, perfect carpet craft and, on the other hand, most unusual design created by a Berlin-based artist, who is actually a qualified architect. The dealers are often, like Dahlmanns, in their forties and have taken over their upmarket carpet shops, for example on Fifth Avenue in New York, from their fathers. Besides the traditional carpets, they also want to offer something different, something modern and yet of high-quality craftsmanship. |
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Designed in Berlin-Mitte
Already, at the age of 23, Dahlmanns had brought home many small rugs from Tibet. Later, in his early thirties, when he was looking for something very similar for his apartment, there was only „uninspired stuff“, as he says. „The patterns had no language, no communication with the room.“ According to him, these carpets had no concept other than the motto „Now we'll do something unusual“. So he thought up his own carpet designs and flew to Nepal in search of someone who could make the carpets. He came back with 12 carpets which he sold one after the other to friends and acquaintances. After having given up his job as a museum curator in Vienna, he began to think seriously about making his passion for carpets his profession. Back in Berlin, he initially rented gallery rooms, then came the first, still very small rooms in unrenovated shop buildings in Berlin-Mitte. „Before it became really trendy, I paid a very low rent here,“ says Dahlmanns, who meanwhile designs and exhibits in a large shop in the fashionable Mulackstraße in the vicinity of the cult stores Lala
Berlin and A.P.C.
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Carpets to order… and as „takeaways“ And the most amazing thing: not only does Rug Star sell on order in the large metropolises, but customers also simply come into the Berlin shop and buy a carpet on the spot. For 14,000 Euros and more. „At least twice a week someone comes and wants a carpet exactly like this. They are often people who never wanted a carpet, but they change their minds spontaneously when they see ours.“ The same happens in his second shop in Zürich - and soon no doubt in a third shop in Milan. Most of the customers, however, „plan“ their carpets for some time. They are often from the USA or from western Europe: „For instance, someone in Florida will say that he has an Aalto table and a Tilmanns on the wall. To go with these he'd like carpets for his rooms.“ Or the carpet is to provide the missing link between cool architecture and antique furniture, a problem that the interior designer and architect is only too pleased to solve. Then Jürgen Dahlmanns thinks something up, and four months later the client in Miami or Salzburg gets his carpet. |
Iris Braun
is a freelance journalist and author. She is always on the alert on the young design scene for the Berlin city magazine "tip".
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
April 2008
is a freelance journalist and author. She is always on the alert on the young design scene for the Berlin city magazine "tip".
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
April 2008
