The Bogk Rug

From the book: Frank Lloyd Wright Drawings, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, we learn:

"Wright was not always able to design carpets for his homes and buildings. He did so on certain rare occasions, such as for the Heurtley, Coonley, Robie, Meyer May, and Bogk houses in his early work, and the Price, Gillin, David Wright, and Hoffman houses in the later part of his career. But of all these works, the most extensive was unquestionably the carpet designs for the Imperial Hotel."

(emphasis mine)

So that is why we are taking so much time on the rug, and why this will be a long post. I think it will be mostly images, though.

You might remember this photo. It is the first thing you see when you enter the house:

And you probably notice that you see a lot of orange.

A LOT of orange.

Now, far be it from me to question TAA and Oglivanna on their design choices. And I can tell you this - that color really grows on you. It is a very bright and cheerful color. And if you think about where TAA was based, out in Arizona at Taliesin West, you might appreciate the colors more.

But this house is in Milwaukee.

And I also want to say that we are not going to live in a museum, as the Elsners before us did not want to live in a museum.

But that carpet is at least 50 years old, and we felt it might be time for a change. So we decided to do some research and find out what the original rug looked like, and maybe take some design hints from that and make our own decision about what we are going to do with the rugs.

Here is the original rug design we found at the Avery Library at Columbia University. (Thank you to them! Very much)

The designs are slightly modified (the living room icons are a bit shorter, I believe) but the layout corresponds to what we have in the house now.

Then, this is the rug design from TAA for the Elsners:

Mostly the same designs, but one transcription error crept in. The icon from the dining room to the living room was reversed:

Check the drawing above.

The TAA folks did a very good job of documenting the icons. But we only found one complete design - and this is the one that is reversed above. These are the original colors:

and here it is as rewoven (and reversed):

The design is slightly simpler, but the colors are changed to compliment the orange field.

This is one of the three identical icons from the living room:

This is the other big icon that goes to the front door. There is some confusion about how this one ends up on the left side of this photo:

This is a detailed look at that rug, the current one:

And because we have furniture in the room, I don't have a great photo of the icon here. So you get a photo of some chairs and Lulu, for scale. She likes to be in my photos.

When we started doing research on the original rugs, we has some yarn samples and descriptions. The yarns are shown here:

You can see the body calls for grey, and other colors for the details and icons. (Thanks to the Milwaukee Art Museum for letting us see and photograph these samples). You can also see that some of the samples are twisted colors (the bottom three). So we were drying to see the original colors in place.

Now if you do a web search for the Bogk Rug, you find out many things. There was a poster made buy the Milwaukee Art Museum showing the original colors, or as close as you can get with an image of a reproduction on a website:

Doreen did a lot of research and discovered that the original rugs were purchased by the Tom Figge and for a time were on display at the Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa. We tried to contact the museum, but did not have much luck. But through the previous owners of the house we learned that Toomey & Co, an antiques dealer in Chicago could make an introduction, and indeed could help us see the rugs.

We contacted John Toomey and he could not have been nicer or more helpful. He had access to three of the original rugs, and would have them delivered to his warehouse if we wanted to come to Chicago.

And we did! And it was pretty amazing.

First we stopped by the Tai Ping (Rug weavers) showroom at the Design Center and picked up a "Pom Book" with sample of many of their yarns. 

We had two of those huge books. That is 480 different pom color samples that we could play with.

Then we had to get to the warehouse where the rugs were being stored. Not to make this a travel blog, but this was the week of the big November snowstorm in Chicago. It was a mess.

But when we got there, we were greeted by John, and this:

Incredible. The original rugs, the original designs, the original (if worn and faded) colors.

We spent several hours on our hands and knees looking closely at the designs and the colors of these original rugs. 

It was a treat.

This is the dining room icon

North Living Room Rug Icon, by the front door

Living Room icon, one of three identical

Details

Poms, and original yarn samples (images) that we had to play with

Matching poms and colors

More matching.

But as I said above, we are not trying to create a museum. So we took the poms back to Milwaukee (Thank you Tai Ping. We promise we will return them!) and started to compare the colors with colors of our brick and floors.

Here, we have an image of the plebian poms paying homage to their pom overlords.

Whew. That is a lot of about these rugs. And it really only scratches the surface. Luckily for us, Domi and Nate are helping us digitize the designs, which we will need to get to the weavers:

Each square will have to have a pom color. each line will have to have a color as well. 

We also learned that the Meyer May House in Grand Rapids, Michigan has rewoven their rugs. That house was constructed in 1909, only a few years before the Bogk House, and we decided to take a trip there to see the house, and the rug. (Another bad travel story with this trip. Maybe I will tell about that on my other blog. But we made it there, and we made it home)

The icons of the Meyer May House are much different, but the colors are not dissimilar.

And the large field of color is very pleasing.