Our Story

For over 60 years, FJ Hakimian has been the premier resource for carpets, textiles and tapestries.

Joseph Hakimian was born in Iran and came to the United States in 1962 to study engineering, then worked as a scientist at AT&T before turning to the thing he loved. He built the gallery on antique carpets from the major weaving areas of the world, with pieces reaching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was an early champion of twentieth-century Swedish and Art Deco carpets, long before they became fashionable. In 2001 he added our Custom Carpets Collection of hand-made rugs.

Joseph Hakimian passed away in 2019. His wife and daughters lead the gallery now, and under them it has grown well beyond carpets. Our collaborations bring together designers and artisans including HAMREI, Juan Montoya, Dawn Bendick and the Kyoto weavers of Tatinoya, along with Japanese fabrics, wallcoverings, bamboo shades, washi paper and flexible veneer.

Our textiles, both hand-woven and mechanically woven, now include upholstery fabrics, curtains and shades, wall coverings, silk fabrics, leather and accessories. Alongside them are our extremely popular Plant Fiber Mats, woven in South America and South Africa, and Moroccan carpets, Tuareg mats and vintage kilim compositions.

We still buy, commission and collect by the standards Joseph set, and prefer to work directly with the weavers and makers. Fineness is easy to measure; character is not, and character is what makes a piece worth keeping. You can read more about the gallery’s founder in our journal.