In reading your piece on Oriental Rugs, I feel that I must respond to some of the points.

As you know, I am fortunate to be a part of an oriental rug family in Dallas since 1934. My grandfather and father built a business on honesty and trust.

I can see by the project that you write about that a very good thing is going on in Afghanistan. There have been various projects over the years that have tried to do this. In fact, the Oriental Rug Retailers of America, which my father founded, attempted to address some of these issues, with respect to child labor back in the 70′s.

My questions though, are these. If 92% of the proceeds from the sale of the rugs in the project is going to be returned to the weavers, how does the wool get purchased, spun, and dyed? And how do the rugs get shipped and marketed. There are a number of costs associated with producing a rug that go far beyond just weaving cost. Don’t misunderstand me, I think what these people are doing is very worthwhile, but I guess that I may be misunderstanding the math here.

Additionally, the statement about only buying a rug with a mission disturbs me a little. Are people to assume that those of us in this business that are not here simply for what we can take FROM our community, but rather to live by the idea that one needs to put back into the community that we take from….should we be excluded from the rug buying public?

My grandfather and father thought it extremely important to do those things. And they were not concerned about whether people should know. A lot of people in Dallas do a great deal for the underprviledged here, and without any fanfare.

As the people you have written about are doing, my family has done for the last 75 years. No “Going out of Business” sales, no “80% Off” sales….just honest dealing with the people of this community, with the idea that you put into the community what you get out of it.

I believe that the project in Afghanistan is wonderful…..but let’s not lose sight of great things being done by the local community as well. I count my self as one of those.

David

Rejebian and Son Oriental Rugs
6604 Snider Plaza
Dallas, TX 75205

For many of these women, Arzu rugs are the sole source of almost one year’s worth of family income and their ticket to literacy, health care, and a better life for their children.

Why Dallas? Because, said Duckworth, we have a growing economy, a  sophisticated design community, intense interest in great design, and we’ve weathered the lousy economy. We also have big hearts.

The Arzu story started, ironically, with a trader from Goldman Sachs in 2004. Chicago native Connie Duckworth, a retired Wall partner and managing director, visited Afghanistan with the U.S. Afghan Woman’s Council to try and figure out a way to give these women some hope — subservient women who (some) were beaten by their husbands, covered in burkas, women who washed clothes in icy-cold Chicago-like weather with bare bleeding hands because they had no laundromats, no hot water. It was a most unusual trip for Goldman’s first female sales and trading partner, but Duckworth had already retired and was looking for the next chapter of her life.

She flew in on a military C 130 cargo plane — no seats, no heat, special forces strapped out scouting for missiles, circular landing to avoid attack. There, in 2003, she saw first hand that Afghan women suffered a 100% illiteracy rate in rural areas. Virtual slaves to their husbands, they had no medical care, and they stayed indoors hidden in refugee camps raising children and caring for their families. One thing they did have, however, was the centuries old gift of rug weaving in a country renown for it’s delicately beautiful and high-quality rugs. Rugs that were knotted and tied by hand, created of natural abrash-style vegetable dyes, rugs that took time to create. Duckworth decided to harness their talent for rug-making so they could become self-sustaining, earn enough money to become self-reliant and support their families.

But she wisely didn’t stop with salaries alone. Duckworth created an infrastructure that helped the weavers become literate. She devised contracts that husband and wife had to sign, husbands signing with a fingerprint (because they cannot write) to indicate acceptance of the contract promising that if Arzu contracted for the rug, the weaver would be paid not only for her work but for attending school to become literate and she would also send her children to school, educate them.

Duckworth set up a business model for Arzu Rugs with as much pro bono support as she could, from the architect Zaha Hadid, interior designer Thomas Schoos, graphic artists and others she recruited from top U.S. contract design firms — such as Odegard Rugs  — even an office in the John Hancock Building in Chicago. She created a framework that, in six years, has created 800 jobs in rural Afghan areas, those jobs providing support for 2100 individuals. She used her own money initially, but subsequently received a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. She’ll take as many freebies as she can to minimize overhead with the ultimate goal of returning 100%  of the purchase price of the rug — ranging from $500 to $15,000 — back to the Afghan women. What I don’t want to do, she told me, is have to be dependent on donations.

“Billions of dollars have been poured into that country,” she says. “Very little has touched the people at the lowest level.”

U.S corporations have made major image shifts in the last two years, says Duckworth, to take a more wholistic approach and make a statement about who they are through conscientious design. Many buy Arzu rugs and hang them as art, labeling them with the Arzu story. In fact, I heard just this week how many corporation are selling off high-brow art collections to galleries like Heritage Auction Galleries and selecting less expensive but expressive works. They have learned that most of their employees don’t appreciate the haute quality of the pieces anyhow and aim, instead, for a more socially-conscious, less conspicuous display. Besides, said Ed Beardsley, Vice President of Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, if they bought them at great prices the sales are proving quite lucrative. Consumers, too, are practicing responsible consumerism.

“Families all want the same basic things,” Duckworth told me over drinks at St. Ann Court. “They want their children to be healthy and grow up safely to enjoy a better world. That’s what we want, that’s want these Afghan men and women want.”

Once the women began earning money, says Duckworth, they gained a new sense of empowerment and respect within their own families. They were the breadwinners. Now, she says, the women will sign the contracts because they have learned to read and write while the husbands are still making fingerprints. Through grants, Arzu has helped bring midwives and healthcare to the rural Afghan communities and even just completed what must be the most sought-after structure in all of Afghanistan: an indoor laundromat with hot water and a tea-room.

“Our women tell me they feel like a blind woman getting their eyes back once they learn to read,” says Duckworth. “And then one told me, I weave so my daughters won’t have to.”

Photo: The fibers that free the women of Afghanistan.

At it’s Metropolitan Home sponsored debut party Thursday night, the new Cantoni house cradled these puppies as eye candy. There was the newest Bugatti and a few Bentleys ranging in price from $135,000 (the cheapest) to $1.1 million, I think, my head was swimming once I saw a car priced for more than a million dollars.  Good thing I toured the contemporary masterpiece the previous day; the 7500 square foot home was bursting at the seams and loaded with every design/architectural Who’s Who in Dallas, from the 22 foot long counter connecting the bar with the kitchen to the exterior pool-side linear fire pit. I could see why they wanted the cars there — the Cantoni homes’ garage is like a piece of art, with clean lines, porcelain tile floor, and sliding glass doors. Perfect showplace for designer cars. The idea, which is so smart, is that you arrive home every night in your garage, you see this room every day, sometimes more than you’d like. Why not make it attractive? Or enjoy the same foyer your guests enjoy — the house is designed so that you enter the front foyer from the garage and walk into the most beautiful formal rooms first thing. The view from the garage is spectacular.

The home, which was conceived, drawn and designed right at Cantoni on Alpha Road, utilized all the Cantoni Design Studio resources, taking into consideration a total design plan for the interiors. This approach is unique in the Dallas area, and Cantoni, now in the building biz, aims to change the way contemporary homes are built and purchased in this market.

The Cantoni house has a name –Axis.  It is derived from the whole experience of walking through the house around an “axis”. Enter through the large steel pivot front door and your view is first a dazzling outdoor sculpture. The architects wanted every axis in the home to end with a dramatic focal point — at times a sculpture, another time a fabulous tree, pool or the lush gardens.

You will be hearing a lot about this home over the next few months, as it marries Cantoni’s 25 years of great design with superb, sleek construction. How gutsy, I thought when I first stepped in, is it of a furniture and decor store to take on new construction (like now), but how smart are they to capitalize on their brand from not just furniture but to cabinets and drawers. Oh — go up and see the media room, most beautiful I have seen in ages. A second Cantoni home in the Uptown area is already underway — I can hardly wait!

They just drink it.

Next thing you know, people will be filling their swimming pools.

KRLD radio personality Ernie Brown recently moved from the West Village to a new “stately Brown manor”  WAY up in Frisco — Shoal Creek Villas — so close to 121 you can see the highway from his second floor. But for Brown, it’s well worth the drive.

“It’s the quietest house I’ve ever lived in,” he says, “it took me two weeks to know that no noise is normal.” The house was so quiet it was keeping him up at night, in fact. You would think he wanted to be closer in to his job, like he was when he lived five minutes from the KRLD studios at Mockingbird and Central.  In fact, that was TOO close to work for him — Brown says he’d often go to a sandwich shop just to mentally prepare himself for work. Or wake up.

So here’s the bachelor pad, a two story, 2800 square foot home he picked up in the mid $300′s. Smart buy: Brown’s surrounded by homes that are more expensive, including the one next door listed for $424,000. For a bachelor, the house was in great shape. His kitchen stove was so spotless I asked if anyone ever used it.

“I paid a cleaning woman to come by three weeks ago, and she cleaned so well I haven’t used the kitchen since, didn’t want to dirty it.” Typical guy!

Brown admits he has no decorating vision, so feel free to pitch in some ideas. I asked him if he was going to keep the existing wall color and he gave me a look I’ve seen hundreds of times: “why wouldn’t I?” He’s got a new king-sized bed (cost a fortune) in the huge master, a red dining room, a library with shelves for his many books, two bedrooms upstairs including the “nursery” — one room he will have to paint to cover up the baby room stencils, and a game room where his computer paraphernalia is all set up. (I was impressed that Brown relegated the computer stuff upstairs — my son would have had it in the middle of the great room.) But outside, it’s party central: outdoor kitchen, bar, grill, kegerator, and spa. Brown’s all set for some fun in the sun and when it gets too hot, he and his friends can do jack-knifes across the street at his community pool. $150 a month covers the pool, and all lawn maintenance in the front of his home. This is his third home, and the biggest change of all. But Brown got a great deal and a lot of bang for his buck up in Shoal Creek Villas.

Don’t tell anyone.

What lurks behind this beautiful door above the Regent’s movie theater at Highland Park Village? One of the world’s best designers, an Architectural Digest 100, creating beautiful design from her Dallas base.