About Us

Leon Norell is an importer of handmade Oriental carpets. Of special interest, particularly to Interior Designers, are his hard-to-find colours, much in demand for today’s interiors. A wheat farmer in Persia in his youth, his father late Henry Norell, came to England in 1925, swiftly to gain prominence among the community of carpet merchants trading at the famous Port of London Authority bonded warehouses, in the City. Built for the East India Company by Clive of India in the18th Century, the ‘Cutler Street’ warehouses, as they were known, were an entrepôt for tea, coffee, port, vanilla, spices, resin, peacock feathers and other products from the East. They were also the Oriental carpet centre of the West, to which foreign buyers would throng. It was from there that his father came to be the premier supplier to all the West End department stores and many international buyers.

In the 1960s Leon became famous for offering the public the opportunity to choose from over £6m worth of Oriental carpets at ‘half retail’. He was catapulted to fame by The Sunday Times Insight Team who, posing as customers, actually went to investigate an advertisement purporting to offer 100,000 Persian and Chinese carpets from which to choose. The following week he was given front page acclamation!

In those days, Persian carpets were in high demand, appreciating in value and promising to be the ideal hedge against inflation. With the recession of the 1980s, however, the demand diminished. So Leon offered the unprecedented opportunity of buying his carpets, using them for ten years and then returning them for full refunds. Fortunately for him, with the turn in the market, no-one took up his offer.

Today, aside from his rare colours, Leon Norell offers very beautiful, surprisingly inexpensive silk carpets, examples of which are to be seen on here on the website.

“A word about buying a carpet as an investment,” he says. “It’s one thing for the value of a carpet to increase. It’s quite another finding someone to buy it.”