exuberant, eclectic vintage Berber rugs
Authentic Moroccan Carpets
The best Moroccan rugs have unique design characteristics, arising from a craft mostly undertaken by women for personal use. While simple and graphic cream and brown Beni Ouarain carpets have seemingly modernist qualities, many lesser known Moroccan tribes wove rugs with high-energy, complex and constantly changing designs in bold, bright and vibrant colours. As time goes by and original Berber carpets are harder to find, we've been travelling further afield to source wonderfully eclectic and colourful vintage rugs from smaller tribes and unexplored regions. The nature of the bold styles we've been finding is as varied as the different tribes and the women who created the rugs
In the central and western areas of the Morocco we found some gloriously characterful rugs from the Chiadma and Boujad regions, as well as Azilal - areas well respected for their carpet production. These carpets display all the liveliness and intriguing design that is slowly being lost in some Berber art
Berber rug culture
Primarily created for domestic use, rather than for sale, - and woven not only in wool but also in mixed fibres - cotton, man-made yarns, recycled textiles - these are impressive rugs that look back to a time when women produced carpets for their own families in self supporting Berber cultures. The long, rectangular shapes of some show they were probably woven as sleeping mats for a semi-nomadic lifestyle. We often imagine the colour and beauty such carefully created rugs would have bought to what might have been a pretty simple rural life
Eclectic symbols and designs
Moroccan rugs like these can give an opportunity to create and authentic eclectic style that is characterised by a multitude of fabrics, patterns, and art items and they offer the opportunity to deploy unexpected use of materials and colour, and juxtapose rough with glossy; traditional with modern, light with dark
The rugs in our hand picked selection also enable you to connect to traditional, rural and natural tradition of Berber craft. Their designs are very much part of the rural culture and landscape that created them, with narratives and intense colours drawn from Berber beliefs and customs
Some of our finds fascinate us again and again by their surprising spontaneity and freedom of design, as the weaver incorporated into her work her own intuitions and imagination in wildly expressive in execution
We will adding rugs regularly to this vibrant collection. Just keep an eye on the website or be in contact to see what we have in our yet to be released inventory.