Bryan Huffner: Oriental carpet merchant

Bryan Meredith Huffner, oriental carpet merchant and manufacturer: born London 17 July 1924; staff, Oriental Carpet Manufacturers Company 1947-86, director 1953-65, managing director 1965-86; managing director, The Tibetan Carpet Centre 1986-2006; married 1970 Kay Barker (Née Seymour; one stepdaughter); died London 13 December 2007.

Bryan Huffner was born into the oriental carpet business: his father, Richard Huffner, a Levantine from Smyrna, was a director of the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers Company (OCM); his mother was a carpet designer. The OCM had been founded in 1908 by a group of Anglo-French-Italian Levantines of Smyrna and for years dominated the carpet trade of Turkey and Persia (now Iran).

After Atatürk's army removed the Greek occupying forces from Smyrna in 1922, Huffner's father moved to the company's London office. As soon as Bryan was old enough, his father sent him to the Continent to spend his school holidays learning languages with the families of clients. After Second World War service with the RAF, Huffner joined the OCM at their premises in Newgate Street, next to the Old Bailey. He started at the bottom, stitching labels on carpets and portering, learning how to identify and judge the carpets that came in from Persia, India, Russian Turkistan, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and China.

In 1948 Cecil Edwards, who had recently retired as managing director and was the doyen of the London oriental carpet trade, took Huffner out to Persia for a year. Edwards, who had spent 11 years in Persia, was rewriting his classic book The Persian Carpet, the manuscript of which had gone up in flames in 1923 in Hamadan. They went by flying boat to Cairo, Khartoum and Basra, where they crossed the river to Iran and picked up a Ford station wagon that had been sent on ahead for them.

They spent a year visiting all the weaving centres of Persia, alternating their stays in the grand company houses with nights in fleabitten roadside teahouses and the mansions of the great khans. Huffner learned to speak Persian, to understand the dealings of the bazaar and to judge what a Persian actually meant when he was speaking. Above all, he learnt about wool, dyes, designs and the process of weaving.

When they reached the holy city of Mashhad, word from the bazaar reached the ears of the curator of the shrine treasures that the greatest expert on Persian carpets had arrived in town. Edwards and Huffner were invited to the shrine to identify and value the store of carpets that had been donated over the years by wealthy pilgrims. The curator stated, as tactfully as he could, that he trusted the valuation of Edwards more than that of his own countrymen.

From this comment Huffner understood that, if he was to deal successfully in Persia, he must never lose the trust of the bazaar. He never forgot it and it has been said of him that, in the sometimes tricky world of oriental carpets, his integrity was regarded as second only to that of the governor of the Bank of England. He demanded the same from his customers and from his suppliers; once let down by either, he would never deal with them again. No carpet dealer in Persia wanted to be on the OCM blacklist.

In the 1960s, the carpet business became more and more competitive, as all sorts of indifferent merchandise flooded the European markets. Huffner decided that, to survive and flourish, the OCM had to be the best. He instructed his agents to buy only the best merchandise and berated them whenever they fell short of his standards. He was constantly travelling. Whenever he heard of a new source of carpets, he took to aeroplane and jeep – anything short of a donkey – to try to get hold of it before anyone else did.

The secret of the success of the OCM at this time was the chemical wash, which gave a desirable patina of age to new rugs. The formula was indeed a secret, known only to Huffner and the manager of the OCM washing plant in the Old Kent Road.

In 1986, the shareholders of the OCM sold the company and the new owners asked Huffner to leave. The new company, Eastern Kayam, ironically a descendant of an early breakaway offshoot of the OCM, was soon in trouble and shortly had to be dissolved. However, Huffner was a phoenix and, at the age of 62, started a new company, The Tibetan Carpet Centre (TTCC), dealing in rugs woven in Nepal by Tibetan refugees.

Huffner had first gone to Nepal in 1975, having heard that the Swiss Red Cross had started a weaving project for the Tibetan refugees. He knew nothing more than this and, on arriving at Kathmandu, asked a taxi driver if he could take him to meet some weavers. Impressed by what he saw, he immediately ordered and paid for 1,000 square metres of rugs, to the alarm of his colleagues in London, who thought they would never sell. Huffner, a determined and precipitate man, would have none of it.

Realising that the traditional Tibetan dragon and cloud designs were out of date, he put his design team in London to work producing totally modern designs, with just a hint of Tibetan motifs. It can certainly be argued that he was thereby corrupting ethnic traditions, but Huffner's view was always that one lived in a market and that weavers, who needed to earn a living, should weave what the customers wanted. If fashions changed, the weavers should change with them. The new range was a huge success and the weavers multiplied in numbers, so much so that the Dalai Lama invited Huffner to Dharamsala to thank him personally for his contribution to the welfare of the Tibetan refugees. Huffner told the Dalai Lama that, of all the people he had ever dealt with, the Tibetans were the most trustworthy.

To his colleagues Huffner appeared as a man running a tight ship, consumed by a single purpose. This was true, but at the same time, in this day of disposable "human resources", he inspired a great loyalty, which he reciprocated, often generously and totally discreetly. But he also played hard and, during his long bachelorhood, he was well known at Annabel's. Meetings with favoured Persian colleagues over in London were occasionally known to finish with the dawn.

Huffner's one recreation was skiing in Zermatt, where he met his wife Kay. Marriage brought him a family and widened his social circle. He became a model stepfather and later took great joy in his stepdaughter's children. When his knees refused to ski any further he and Kay acquired a house at Port Grimaud, in the south of France, with a very fast speedboat, which he piloted in the mornings to collect fresh bread and croissants, bringing them back, still hot from the oven, for their many guests.

Antony Wynn

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