About Us

Leon Norell is an importer of handmade Oriental carpets. Of special interest, particularly to Interior Designers, are his reproductions of original antique Zieglers, so-named after the Ziegler family of Zurich, who had them made on the basis of remnants of 18th and 19th Century fabrics, to be found in museums. Woven in Afghanistan, these carpets continue to be made in the traditional way, with vegetable dyes, but in the hard-to-find colours in demand for today’s interiors.

Leon Norell is the son of the late Henry Norell, renowned international carpet broker and nephew of the late Joe Nehorai, notable for his ‘Eastern Kayam OCM’ dynasty. A wheat farmer in Persia in his youth, his father Henry came to England in 1925, swiftly gaining prominence among the community of carpet merchants, trading at the Port of London Authority’s famous Cutler Street bonded warehouses, in the City. In the years to follow, he came to be carpet broker for every major London retail store and numerous international carpet buyers.

Built by ‘Clive of India’ for the East India Company in 1780, the ‘PLA’ warehouses had by the early 1900s become an entrepôt for all sorts of merchandise, imported from Persia, China, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and the USSR, for re-shipment to the West. Tea, coffee, port, vanilla, spices, resin, peacock feathers and every sort of handmade carpet were to be found there, stacked ‘high as an elephant’s eye’. This was the Oriental carpet centre of the world, to which foreign buyers would throng.

Trading from an adjacent office in Devonshire Row, Leon Norell became renowned in the 1960s for offering the public the opportunity to choose from the millions of pounds worth of Oriental carpets to be found at Cutler Street, at ‘half retail’. In 1967 he was unexpectedly catapulted to fame by The Sunday Times Insight Team, who, posing as customers, went to investigate an advertisement in which he purported to offer ‘100,000 Oriental carpets from which to choose’. The following week he was given front page acclamation in The Business News!

In those days, Persian carpets were in high demand, steadily appreciating in value and promising to be the ideal hedge against inflation. With the recession of the 1980s, however, the throng diminished. So Leon Norell offered readers the unprecedented opportunity to buy his carpets, use them for ten years and then if they wished, return them for their money back in full. Fortunately for him, no-one took up his offer.

Today, meeting today’s new trend in contemporary designs, Leon Norell has now introduced to the market a spectacular range of no less than 150 designs, woven in Nepal in pure wool and silk.