Jan Kath has been dubbed “the rock star of carpets”, which is ironic given that rock isn’t really his thing. He’s more of a techno kind of guy; in fact, prior to launching his extremely successful, eponymous carpet brand, he used to organise large-scale dance parties in Goa.
So it is unsurprising, perhaps, that when a bona fide rock star, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, called him a few years ago to order one of his carpets, Kath initially had no idea whom he was talking to. It’s also a mark of how diverse – but also how universal – Kath’s designs are that another of his most famous clients is the Pope.
I meet Kath in the new Iwan Maktabi boutique in The Dubai Mall, where his creations form the backbone of a beautifully curated collection of contemporary carpets. We are joined by Mohamed Maktabi, the founder of the Beirut-headquartered company, who is the third generation of his family to be involved in the carpet business and is Kath’s exclusive representative in the Middle East.
Kath also comes from solid carpeting stock – both his father and grandfather were carpet dealers – although he himself had no intention of pursuing a career in the industry. He acknowledges, however, that he must have caught the carpet bug as a youngster, albeit unwittingly. “I must have inhaled it from a very early age,” jokes the German-born entrepreneur.
Kath clearly remembers the first carpet that he really made a connection with. “My father never pushed me, but I remember that once I did show an interest, he really loved it. He gave me a Bijar carpet as a gift, when I was about 12 or 13. I still have that carpet – it hangs on one of my walls.”
Nonetheless, Kath studied commerce, not carpets, at university and after completing a mandatory stint in the German civil service, made his way to India, before winding up in Nepal. Here, a chance meeting with one of his father’s former suppliers, who offered him a job, meant that he did eventually end up in the carpet business. If one believed in such things, they might call it destiny.
“After two years working for that guy and travelling around the world, he asked if I wanted to buy his factory. And I did. Naive as I was, I did that, not really knowing what it meant.
“I am not a trained designer. I must underline this,” Kath is quick to add. “I bought the factory with the help of my dad. He really liked the idea. But after we bought it, I realised that I didn’t have any money left to hire a designer. So I started to develop my own ideas, because I had to. It took me quite a few years to leave the corner of mainstream stuff, and it was financially really difficult.”
What Kath did in the process was completely revolutionise the industry, by combining traditional Nepalese craftsmanship with the best-quality materials, and then adding unexpectedly modern, intricately crafted designs into the mix. “I think that I, and a couple of other people, changed the industry,” he says. “There was always contemporary design, or new stuff, but the quality of the carpet itself and also the quality of the design, was pretty low. It was made more for the mass market. The high-end weavers were always reserved for the traditional and classical stuff. We opened it up, which was hard. Because those weavers are very proud of their tradition.”
Did they think he was crazy, with his outlandish ideas and out-there designs? “Absolutely. They’d done the same traditional patterns for generations, for hundreds of years. And then all of a sudden, this German guy comes from nowhere and says: ‘Stop this; let’s do it the other way around from now on.’ They were really afraid of losing their heritage. But now people are lining up to work for us. Because we have changed the game.”
This is not bravado; it is fact. One only need look at Kath’s Spacecrafted collection, where intensely detailed, vividly coloured images of space are reproduced in carpet form. “Usually, a carpet would carry six or seven colours, max. But my Spacecrafted collection features 60 colours, in two materials. Which means that just from a dyeing point of view, the process has to be carried out 120 times, instead of six or seven times. That’s already a huge step forward. By having a higher knot count, we almost achieve a photorealistic result. At the end of the day, I am treating the knot as a pixel. So, the more pixels per square inch, the more photorealistic you get.”
Another obvious example of the brand’s progressiveness can be seen in the Erased Heritage collection, where a traditional-looking background appears to be slowly disappearing under a cloud-like layer of silk. It’s an obvious manifestation of the interplay between old and new, which is a defining characteristic of the Jan Kath portfolio.
“People might think that we use an old, existing carpet, and put stuff on top of it, which is not the case. It is actually woven and produced in one process. But the traditional bit looks and feels like an antique piece – like it has been used for 100 years.”
Another differentiator is Kath’s preferred palette of materials. “I only use natural materials,” he says. “We use Tibetan highland wool. The wool comes from a certain height – the higher the animal lives and the colder it gets, the more lanolin it produces to protect itself. I also use a lot of silk. I believe we are the largest silk-consuming company in Nepal. I think we use three tonnes of silk a month, which is quite an amount. I also work a lot with stinging nettle; we use the stem of the nettle plant, split into very fine fibres, which is washed, softened and then spun by hand into a very fine yarn.”
With a starting price of about Dh4,160 per square metre, these are real investment items. Of course, it took some doing to convince consumers that well-made contemporary carpets could be as valuable as the antique and classical pieces that have been prized for so long.
“It’s a generational thing,” Maktabi notes. “When I started 20 or 30 years ago, people with money wouldn’t have bought into contemporary stuff. They still would have thought that handmade Oriental carpets were the ultimate investment.”
It was a particularly difficult shift in this part of the world, where ties to traditional carpets are so entrenched. “It was extremely hard,” Maktabi says. “In the Levant, particularly, there are two things, carpets and gold, that you buy and you keep. Because they retain their value. For people to create a home and not put down a traditional Oriental carpet – to move instead towards a contemporary carpet that costs the same amount – was tough. But it is happening.”
A growing appetite for contemporary art has been instrumental in challenging long-held perceptions of what is and is not valuable, on a wider level, Maktabi suggests. “People started accepting the idea that a carpet doesn’t have to have belonged to your grandmother to have value. Increasingly, people are thinking: ‘Why shouldn’t my carpet talk to my new painting from this up-and-coming artist?’ Everything aligned in the art and design industries to make people more accepting of new things.”
It’s an age-old debate: what’s the difference between art and design? Popular thought dictates that design must have function, whereas art might not. But it strikes me that if anything bridges the gap between the two creative fields, it is carpets, in general, and Kath’s, in particular. So how does he classify his pieces?
“The way I have learnt it, design has to have a function and art doesn’t. Art is something that you cannot discuss. It’s there and you either like it or you don’t. And design has to work. But the two are connecting at the moment. Let me put it this way. It would be the greatest thing in the world if people recognised my work as the collectibles of tomorrow. But I am not the one who can say: ‘I produce art.’”
Whether carpets can be classified as art or not, according to Maktabi, people still underestimate how much impact they can make on a space. “You are filling a whole dimension of a room with a carpet. Often it is much larger than a piece of art. Visually, it has a very strong influence on the environment.”
If you’re unconvinced, have a play with the Jan Kath app, which is available for free on iTunes and allows consumers to envisage what his carpets would look like in their own space. “You can take a picture of your living room and play around with my collections,” he explains. “You can drop any of my carpets into pre-prepared environments and immediately see and feel how big the influence of a carpet is in a room. I love the idea of combining high-end modern technology with traditional approaches. That’s also the case when it comes to our designs – it’s really the marriage of the past and the future.”
Read this and more stories in Luxury magazine, out with The National on Thursday, May 12.
sdenman@thenational.ae