Shops that specialize in luxury items frequently offer frills to pamper customers and create a certain atmosphere: exotic plants, comfy chairs, complimentary wine.
Main Street Oriental Rugs doesn’t have any of that — there’s no room for it. You’ve heard of wall-to-wall carpet? This place is wall-to-wall area rugs.
Owner Mojan Bagha says the inventory in his store numbers around 3,500. Chest-high stacks of rugs cover the floors of the two main rooms at the front of the shop, leaving aisles where you can walk between them. More rugs cover the walls. There’s even one hanging in a doorway to screen off the back room.
To an eye such as Bagha’s, trained over three decades of appraising, buying and selling rugs made in the Near, Middle and Far East, each piece reveals its country and even the locality of origin.
“A city will have its own design,” he says, noting the characteristic turquoise and muted tones in the intricate pattern of a rug made in the Iranian town of Nain.
It’s one of a relative few Persian rugs in Bagha’s shop, where most of the inventory comes from China, India and Pakistan. Now that economic sanctions have been lifted and dealers can bring Persian rugs and other goods to America legally, the percentage in the Ellicott City shop figures to grow.
Bagha himself is an Iranian import. A native of Tehran, he was in college in the Pacific Northwest when revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed government in Iran in 1979. The fundamentalist clerics who came to power would strictly enforce their interpretation of Islamic doctrine and law, and persecution of religious minorities quickly intensified.
As adherents of the Baha’i faith, which espouses universal brotherhood and holds that all religion stems from the same spiritual source, Bagha’s family became targets. The regime imprisoned his father in 1980, Bagha says, and he determined that returning home would be unwise. He remained in the U.S., eventually going to work for an uncle who imported and sold Oriental rugs in Seattle. He later went out on his own, selling rugs at various exhibitions in the Northwest.
He found the aesthetics of Oriental rugs compelling, but he also enjoyed the cultural exchange the trade represents.
“It’s a beautiful product that enhances the spirit of a room,” he says. “The economies where these rugs are made are very basic. So here’s a way to help sustain them and get something beautiful for it. Trade establishes friendship between nations.”
The work also took Bagha to places across a wide swath of the globe.
“What was beautiful was the chance to travel and meet some wonderful people,” he says.
In 1995, he relocated to the East Coast, where his sister was caring for their father, now free but suffering from dementia. Bagha opened his own rug shop in Frederick before coming to Ellicott City in 1997.
While the burgeoning of Internet commerce — which gives him the ability to examine merchandise remotely and conduct transactions rapidly — has allowed Bagha to cut back on business travel, he still makes trips to Asia and the Middle East, observing and even recording on his phone the work of craftspeople practicing their ancient art.
“Technology is improving all the time; 3-D printers, they’re doing amazing things. But handcrafted, that’s not changed,” Bagha says. “Once you look at a rug that’s machine-made, there’s no comparison.”
He notes that India now mass produces some of the rugs it exports, but the process uses inferior wools and dyes and results in a looser weave than the handmade variety. In short, you get what you pay for.
When you purchase a rug made the traditional way, “you’re buying an artisan’s craft,” Bagha says.
After the wool is spun, dyed and spun again, the weaver uses a loom to hold the basic structure of the rug in place while intertwining and knotting strands in a predetermined pattern. Building a 4-foot-by-6-foot rug takes a minimum of eight weeks, Bagha says.
In October, Bagha journeyed to Varanasi, India, on the banks of the Ganges, to attend a trade show of sorts and visit with local artisans.
“It’s mostly an agricultural economy,” he says. “In October, when agriculture slows, they go into their weaving.”
Bagha notes that the traditions of rug-weaving most often seem to survive and thrive in impoverished communities. While Oriental rugs can cost several hundred or even thousands of dollars and are usually found in well-to-do homes, making them remains a poor man’s art.
Philip Bosen of Silver Spring has collected about 50 Oriental rugs from various dealers, including Bagha, to whom he also brings rugs in need of repair or cleaning. Bosen first met Bagha about 15 years ago, when the shop was still at its first Ellicott City location, just down Main Street from the current one.
Bosen was then an antiques enthusiast just beginning to branch out into rugs. “He was very much willing to talk and show me things. No pressure,” Bosen recalls.
Polly Faulker’s collection isn’t as extensive as Bosen’s, but she has Oriental rugs covering floors in much of her Arlington, Va., home. She found Main Street Oriental Rugs through a Google search. Noting the store’s good reviews, she headed north.
“We went in thinking we weren’t going to buy anything that day, but my husband zeroed in on a blue and white Tibetan piece,” she says. “I wasn’t so sure. But [Bagha] told us, ‘If it doesn’t work, bring it back.’”
Turns out she needn’t have worried. “It was perfect,” she says. “It’s given the room a new energy.”
While the term “Oriental rug” most often conjures images of elaborate and florid patterns, Bagha says younger customers have begun to favor Gabbeh, a relatively minimalist style that usually incorporates a sparsely repeated pattern over a solid color.
The wide variation in prices for Oriental rugs generally reflects differences in weave quality, the sharpness of the design and the vibrancy of the dye. The shop’s prices range from $99 for smaller rugs to $15,000 for pieces considered collectors’ items.
But the most expensive rug isn’t necessarily the best one for a given customer, Bagha says.
“You buy what you enjoy looking at.”