On a recent morning in Brooklyn, Nathan Ursch was meticulously photographing a new inventory of vintage Berber carpets at his New York gallery.
A few dozen hand-picked pieces had just arrived from Morocco.
Mr Ursch, 49, knows his craft, ensuring the colourful, hand-woven carpets are sorted by tribes of origin, year of making and dimensions, before cataloguing them on the website of Breuckelen Berber, the fine vintage Moroccan carpets business he founded with his wife over a decade ago.
“The more I dig into the history of Berber carpets, the more fascinated and interested I become,” he says as sips on a glass of orange blossom-flavoured sparkling water. “They're a doorway to the past.”
Mr Ursch speaks about his passion for the woven art of Berber carpets, a craft and tradition passed on from generation to generation by the indigenous people of North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Berbers inhabited that part of the world for tens of thousands of years – predating the arrival of the Romans – and had their own language, Amazigh, which is still spoken by millions of people in Morocco and neighbouring Algeria.
“I don't just look at it as the Berber culture’s past. It's all of our past,” says Mr Ursch, who shares a lifelong passion for design and the decorative arts with Brin Reinhardt, his wife and business partner.
The idea for Breuckelen Berber started 12 years ago when the couple decided to buy Moroccan carpets for their own home.
The search led them to Morocco and time-frozen villages in the Atlas Mountains. There, they discovered the unique combination of tribal history and modernity found in Berber woven arts.
Some of the Berber tribes have lived in remote mountainous areas for centuries with minimal external influence on their traditions and way of life.
“They might have the influence of a cellphone or maybe a television here or there. But for the most part … they were left alone. And I think there's a purity to that,” Mr Ursch tells The National.
“I look at them and [think] this is where we came from. This is all of our history, and they are still weaving and placing their ideas into these carpets.”
Mr Ursch grew up in the Midwest, where his family had a huge collection of Oriental carpets.
His parents were antique dealers with his father specialising in Native American textiles, especially Navajo rugs and tribal chiefs’ blankets.
Moroccan carpets, however, were his “own discovery”, and his parents knew nothing about this particular woven art.
To find the best pieces of vintage Berber carpets, most of which were family-woven and owned, Mr Ursch relies on his expertise but also on a network of local pickers, dealers and collectors in Morocco.
The competition can sometimes be fierce.
He recalls one time when he came across six “museum-worthy” carpets that, in a matter of days, switched hands from dealer to dealer in one part of Morocco to the other.
“I just couldn’t live without them,” he says. “So, it didn’t matter what the price was any more. I paid it and chased them down.
“It took three months to get these six carpets, and finally they were mine.”
Prices of vintage Berber carpets depend on factors such as size, condition, age, rarity, dyes used and style of motifs.
They can retail between $500 and $7,500 based on condition, year of production and size. Museum quality and rare Berber carpets can range from $5,000 to $50,000 at premiere galleries, Mr Ursch says.
Breuckelen Berber’s customers are mainly in the US, but people all over the world show interest in vintage Moroccan carpets.
“I have a client in South Africa that I'm dealing with right now, and I have clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, Vancouver, London, Germany, Belgium, Spain,” Mr Ursch said.
For him, it is also a way of giving a new life to these old rugs, some of which belonged to nomadic tribes and travelled through mountain passes and deserts on camels and donkeys.
