Rug Dealer!
When he’s not cooking, you’ll find David Turkestanishvili holding court inside his Aladdin’s lair of rugs and carpets. Set in a basement nook behind his award-winning Rusiko restaurant (rusiko.pl), the chef’s obsession with Georgian ruggery is indulged inside a beautifully compact and chaotic store piled high with rug paraphernalia sourced from his home country.
“Back in Georgia,” says David, “the rug is the heart and soul of a living room. It can add an ‘explosion of life’ to a home and inject its own, almost mystical, personality into your house.” With prices influenced by size, age, material and density, David’s rugs retail from between zł. 500 and zł. 20,000, with the chef keen to point out their esoteric sense of magic. “When choosing a rug, I always tell people to trust their instinct and the concept of ‘love at first sight’. Often, it’s the rug that chooses you! Beyond that, if it’s perfect, then it’s not a good rug. A good rug is handmade, and anything handmade will always have little faults. But buyers need to remember that it is these imperfections that are part of its identity.”
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