Why Persian rugs are so expensive

Even in an increasingly expensive Manhattan, $3.5 million still pays for a lot, like a 2,000-square-foot apartment (without south-facing light) and 12 years of private school for one of the children. But if you’d like to outfit the living room of that apartment with the very finest Persian carpet Jason Nazmiyal is selling out of his Midtown showroom, you’ll need an additional $3.5 million.

For decades, antique Persians, hand-knotted from silk and often taking years or even decades to produce, were the gold standard of floor coverings for the swank, the sine qua non of Oriental rugs. Then the market got flooded with fakes, tastes shifted, and people became aware that most of what they were being sold was as likely to return a profit as a decade-old flat screen TV.

“That’s why we don’t really steer clients towards super-expensive rugs anymore,” said Brian Sawyer, an architect and interior designer whose clients include Madonna and Vera Wang. “Most of the time, they wind up being more trouble than they’re worth.”

In the Hamptons estate of the billionaire Ron Perelman: a flat weave modernist Swedish design carpet with black and blue triangles that looks terrific near a Nakashima bench and a hanging Calder sculpture. In the clothing designer Cynthia Rowley’s West Village townhouse: a starburst-y, geometric millennial-pink carpet from the Rug Company. And in the colonial of the longtime Vogue eminence André Leon Talley, in White Plains: a floral-print, 17th-century French carpet known as an Aubusson, which he bought from Sotheby’s in 2014 during an auction of Bunny Mellon’s precious collectibles. #ASMR