Istanbul Carpet and Flooring Expo 2023

Earlier this December, the first Istanbul Carpet and Flooring Expo took place

The Istanbul Expo Center turned out to be an excellent venue for the inaugural Istanbul Carpet and Flooring Expo fair on 5-8 December. Eight of the eleven halls were filled with large, impressive stands, the hallways were lined with displays and a large room near the entrance was dedicated to an excellent programme of design talks spaced across the first three days.

In terms of exhibitors, 95% were machine made rug brands. The fact that an impressive 7.5 halls were full of machine made rugs from Turkey and Iran demonstrates just what a powerful industry it is, and here all the major brands were represented.

This year, handmade rug stands made up only about half of Hall 2, with about 20 companies on show, predominantly from Turkey. As one of the key organisers of the show, Ahmet Diler of Kirkit was constantly busy around the show while wife Tovi and the members of staff occupied the stand. Kirkit had new designs in the company’s black and white, hemp and goat hair range plus a beautiful purple flatweave, all designed by Muhammed Türk.

Other handmade companies on show included the popular Karavan, who had a constant stream of visitors, antique rugs from A&D Gallery Antique and Decorative Rugs and the inimitable Bereket, who was creating a sea of hearts and Christmas trees on his stand. The main offerings on other stands were attractive pastel coloured Oushak rugs and more traditional kilims. One Indian company that joined in this year was Jaipur Rugs, who brought a range of their hand-knotted designs and were glad to be present.

Perhaps one of the most interesting new brands was showing amongst the handmade stands in Hall 2 but is in fact a producer of machine made rugs. However, these machine made rugs are created with natural materials like wool, hemp, silk, cotton and goat hair. Damga Rugs is a ‘hot off the press’ new brand, set up by a group including Agacan and Burak Aydogan of Knotisse. For this new product a new machine had to be produced, so much investment has gone behind the launch and I will be very interested to see where this goes. The addition of wool, silk and hemp to the machine made designs obviously gave them a more interesting texture and handle.

The ICFE talk programme was also a real highlight. Li Edelkoort spoke on Wednesday afternoon to a packed room, offering her take on upcoming trends in designs and rugs with an encyclopaedic presentation of images. Other trend talks came from the uplifting Copenhagen-based interior designer Naomi Scott-Dunne and Phil Pond. On Tuesday Ali Riza Tuna’s talk ‘The Nature of the Space in Historical Anatolian Weavings’ offered a more traditional look at carpets while on Thursday digital artist Ecem Dilan Köse looked at AI and the future of design. In addition, Editor of HALI, Ben Evans talked to Matthew Bourne of Christopher Farr about designing rugs and my conversation with Reto Aschwanden of Label STEP on Thursday was about the wellness trend and how that should extend to the wellness of weavers.

All in all it was an impressive event. With other brands considering to join next year, I look forward to seeing how ICFE develops.