KUWAIT CITY, March 16: Finally in Kuwait, Rug Star by Jurgen Dahlmann opened at the Samovar Carpets & Antiques at the Al Tilal Commercial Center, Shuwaikh. The event which took place at the 15th of March launched Dahlmann’s handmade collection of Tibetan carpets “supercharged with life and color”.
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, people have always been more inspired - perhaps because they are closer to the heavens than in the district of Mitte in Berlin.
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.
Now 42, Jürgen became a 100% rug addict at 23, on his first trip to Nepal. Rug Star was founded a bare seven years ago in October 2002, when Jürgen moved from architecture to design. The move fits with Jürgen’s view that a rug is the most liberal form of creating a space within a space without erecting obstacles. He aims to treat a carpet as it was originally intended, as a piece of room-creating furniture. Rug Star has come a long way in a short time. Besides winning a brace of prestigious awards in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and having one of his rugs on the cover of Modern Carpets and Textiles, Jürgen has also worked on modular designs for IKEA. Rug Star has shops in Berlin, Augsburg and Zürich and trading partners in fifteen countries.
Intimate
Jürgen Dahlmanns believes that a textile is the most intimate form of furniture. For him, every carpet has its own personality, so naturally his designs are full of personality. His collections draw on many inspirations, some purely whimsical, and others to fit a purpose. The Quentin Tarantino film, Kill Bill, inspired his gun series, but that fantasy is balanced by his Love Stories collection, which combines kids drawings, doodles and scrawls with sophisticated geometries of text and colour. Jürgen respects the traditions of hand-knotted weaving, but he’s no fan of repeated patterns. He prefers what he calls “supercharged landscapes with life and colour.” His are rebels in the ranks of standard classical and modern designs.
Of his three collections, Rug Star Classic is closest to conventional designs, varying from simple geometries to organic florals and washed colour fields. The Rug Addict has obvious Chinese influences in soft or shocking palettes, Sixties psychedelia and more geometries in squares and rectangles. Love Stories introduces text into the designs, which become increasingly personal. His Works in Progress expand the applications into pop art pieces, furniture, rug sculptures, playful modular patterns and freehand scribbles. Jürgen is fearless about what a rug can look like and do, but that is because he has such faith in the traditional techniques to match his imagination.
All of Jürgen’s rugs come from one workshop, in Bhaktapur, Nepal, but this is now much more than a workshop. The 400 workers have a day care centre, a school and a small hospital as an extension of their workplace for them and their children. This quality of care has given him a high ranking in the businesses of Nepal by RugMark, which licences operators who observe their campaign to end child labour. Jürgen places social harmony as the most important factor in producing the highest quality rug. As he sees it, one rug will take four or five people working together rhythmically for as many as four months. The harmony in the rug comes directly from the people working together on the rug.
“Let me say as an introduction: my team and I, we are 100% RUG ADDICTS, we love what we do, we love each rug and if it is less as it could be we are angry, because there is already to much useless rubbish in this world, with no love and no passion and no sense,” says Dahlmann.
“Our rugs are naughty and smart, the same combination I like at people. We do not create repeating patterns or soft structures but supercharged landscapes with life and colour which are similar to your behavior. All rugs are designed in Berlin-Town and produced in Himalaya-Mountains in only one workshop in Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.”