Rug Industry Favourites: Twenty Rugs from Twenty Years Part 1

Twenty rug retailers and industry figures select their favourite rug from the past twenty years. Here Chris Hoyne of Temple Fine Rugs, Perth, Australia, gives his reason for choosing a rug by Sahar

Chris Hoyne of Temple Fine Rugs chooses Sahar Fine SA-026535z, Sahar

While on a mid-life odyssey backpacking east-west across Asia, my father met and befriended Dr Harald Bohmer in Istanbul while searching for genuine Turkish village rugs. Enchanted by the honesty and integrity of the DOBAG project for the revitalisation of the unbroken Western Anatolian rug weaving tradition, Terry signed up to become the first Australasian authorised dealer and returned to Australia with a few bails of DOBAG rugs. Dad had no shop, no retail experience, and little rug knowledge, but he had an infectious passion for the DOBAG story and the integrity of the project and its rugs. 

In the largely decorative Perth rug market, DOBAG rugs (while well-received) were not suitable for every client. However, DOBAG’s reintroduction of natural dyeing techniques and its reassertion that genuine hand-knotted rugs are precious and high-status objects to own, inadvertently also revitalised broader decorative rug production. 

Two decades later, there was another visionary rugophile working collaboratively with tribal weavers in Iran this time, on a rug project that, like DOBAG, would lead the hand-knotted rug world in a new and exciting direction. Haynes Robinson, with his partners Hamed Derakhshan and Behrouz Sarlak, nurtured an artistic collaboration with Qashqa’i women weavers in Iran who were encouraged and supported to create contemporary abstract rugs woven with a good measure of chaos, abandon and gut feel. With Haynes as conductor keeping time, and the traditional weavers as orchestra passionately weaving from history and heart, Sahar rugs was born—and contemporary rugs had never looked so good. 

The confluence of Haynes’s Western eye for colour and composition, the Qashqa’i weavers’ joyful and exquisite signature and the exceptional materiality and finish of Sahar rugs was palpable. For me here in sunny Perth, Western Australia, with our modern architecture and a sophisticated coastal vibe, these rugs with their merging fields of saturated yet earthly colours and multi-layered complexities of vaguely organised organic textures appeared like manna from heaven. Naturally beautiful, they are just as comfortable under an antique long table or a modernist Panton Chair. 

I was introduced to Sahar by the late and very missed Behruz Aligorgi in the early 2000s. For many years the brand, and particularly its Sahar Fine and Fresco Collections, was the very successful backbone of our contemporary rug offering. I am grateful and have deep respect for the products that Haynes, Hamed and Behrouz lovingly and patiently brought to market. They continue to serve the international interior design community so well.  

Finally, to my favourite rug. This rug has no fancy marketing name—it doesn’t need one, it speaks for itself. It is Sahar Fine SA-026535z. Photos never do it justice: you have to experience it first-hand. I have a pet theory that the most beautiful colours are unnameable—using language, you can only hint at them. For this rug words like moss, chartreuse, petrol, kerosene, bronze and Tamagroute come to mind.  

Just when you think it is all about the colour, you realise it is as much about the refined abrash, the density, the lustre, the translucence of the superb wool, the mysterious dissolution of one colour into the next, the balance and the randomness. It’s so effortless and understated that it doesn’t feel designed at all. This rug has been selling in our showroom for maybe fifteen years and still catches my breath each time I open one up.