But the decor, it seems, is not right! Despite the five reception rooms, nine main bedrooms and 16 bathrooms, all spread over 23,000 sq ft, the place is to too small. So, although Toprak, with his woollen rugs, one of the most expensive new-build properties sold in Britain at the time, this house has probably been lived in for less than a week or so since it was completed in 2001, the owners are calling in the builders and the bespoke rug designers.

By the time they’ve finished, as well as all the basics de rigueur for the self-respecting billionaire – such as wireless audiovisuals, pressurised purified water on tap and automatic security shutters, they will also build a new 30-seat cinema, squash and tennis courts, a billiards room, a beauty salon, a 24-carat gold-plated whirlpool bath, a new staff lift and a small river, complete with canoe. Even the helicopter gets its own lift: the helipad in the garden will sink into the ground and the roof will slide across the top.

The end result, expected to cover 42,000 sq ft, looks certain to outclass its next-door neighbour, Lakshmi Mittal, whose own 25,000 sq ft house, Summer Palace, can be peered into from the mansion’s 80ft main reception room. (Not that Mittal is often there: the Indian steel magnate spends most of his time at his other home in Kensington Palace Gardens, west London.)

But where are the carpets and rugs? Currently being imported from india and expected to be laid on every floor in the mansion.

Yuruk rugs are mainly geometric in design. A popular design was a hexagonal motif surrounded by a key design known as the ‘running dog’ motif. The area within the hexagon would be decorated with a design of diamonds of various sizes, within each other, each of a varying colour. Outside the hexagon at each corner would be an octagon within which would be an eight-pointed star. Borders are wide and usually composed of four guards containing geometric leaf motifs. Colours are vivid but pleasingly combined.

The washed up Four Weddings and a Funeral star was returning from a holiday in Turkey and stupidly tried to  sneak 4 oriental rugs through customs. To be far I wouldn’t of known to have declared the rugs so it could of been an honest mistake. But Grant knew otherwise

But they were quizzed for being suspicious. The officer who found the rugs promptly and probably happily arrested Grant for trying to dupe the duty on the imported rugs.

Grant once said to a glossy magazine- “I’ve been arrested… for smuggling. I smuggled. It was a very long time ago. I was coming back from Turkey with a girlfriend with a few rugs. We were such idiots (and still are). We came through an airport in the middle of the night and thought no one would check. So we went through ‘nothing to declare’, but we were stopped.”

The airport officials pulled over the couple and asked, ‘We noticed you have returned from Turkey?’ The couple replied with a sheepish “yes”.

They were then asked to open a “long parcel”. Unfortuneately the rug shaped parcel did indeed contained a beautiful turkish rug. Grant was then asked to proceed in opening the rest of his luggage and out popped 4 large rugs. What a fool.

Next time Hugh, go through and declare your rugs, or you might have to pay another hefty fine for smuggling.

”Oriental carpets have been an integral part of the material culture of the West for 600 years,” said Walter B. Denny, an art historian at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Turkish carpets ”have been an essential part of the American interior since the 19th century,” he also said. As an authority on Islamic and Turkish art, he was the guest curator of ”The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets,” an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington from Sept. 13 through Feb. 16 in 2002.

The show featured 50 colorful Turkish carpets, prayer rugs and cushion covers from the 14th through to the 19th century. Many accumulated  by George Hewitt Myers, an heir to the Bristol-Myers Squibb company fortune who founded the museum in 1925. The London publisher Scala has brought out an illustrated catalog with text by Denny, who explored the classical design sources that inspired Anatolian carpet weavers.

”By classical, I mean carpet designs that have never gone out of style and that have continued to appear in Anatolian rugs over the centuries, sometimes in their original forms and sometimes in designs that have gradually mutated,” Mr. Denny said.

There were carpet-weavers in ancient Egypt, Persia, Syria and the Caucasus, but the  earliest carpet to survive was from Anatolia, the Asiatic portion of modern Turkey. In 1071 Turkic tribes invaded Anatolia from Central Asia, the women of these tribes had a tradition of weaving distinct woolen nomadic carpets. These knotted pile carpets were immensely varied in technique, design, symbolism and function, and they attracted attention. When Marco Polo was in Anatolia in 1271, for example, he said the best carpets in the world were woven there. Early travelers from France also praised them. Soon they were being exported.

“That’s what they want,” said Yousaf Chaman, the director of the Mennonite Central Committee’s rug program. Chaman,  the Pakistan-born and raised American helps run a fair trade program for rug-makers whose rugs are sold at MCC’s Ten Thousand Villages stores.

“They have temporary help, food and shelter but the biggest desire we hear from the artisans is ‘I want to get back to work and to normalcy,’ ” said Chaman who visited the artisans in May.

“Beyond income, it’s the routine you have,” said Chaman, who spoke to his counterparts in Lahore last wednesday morning about the plight of the artisan villagers.

When the flood hit, 200 of the 850 rug-making families scrambled to save their unfinished rugs, looms and equipment. The anchors of the loom are unfortunately buried more than half an metre into the ground and had to be left behind.

“The situation is, so far, that they can’t get work. They’ve got no house, no loom installed. People are basically sitting in tents. Most of their houses are still under water,” said Chaman. It may take months for the water to recede and begin to rebuild people’s homes, he said.

”I look at a room like I’m making a three-dimensional painting,” said Ms. Kirar, who has designed bathroom fixtures for Kallista; furniture for the Baker and McGuire companies; tile for Ann Sacks; and a line of rugs for Tufenkian, called the New Moderns. ”If the right rug’s not there, you just know that something’s missing.”

There are many options beyond standard wool rugs for creating a distinctive look and feeling, said Ms. Kirar, who used a mixture of wool and hemp in her rugs to give them a casual quality. She also incorporated patterns inspired by contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter and Sol LeWitt and the composer John Cage to give them a modern, playful look.

At Aronson’s Floor Covering in Chelsea, she took off her shoes and tested various alternatives to stiff, fibrous sisal. She especially liked the products from Merida Meridian with a woven blend of wool and paper cord, including a zigzag design called Rhythm. The material had a smooth, pleasant texture, ”like sisal but not as hairy,” she said, that would make an ideal runner with binding along the edges.

At the Kasthall showroom in Midtown, Ms. Kirar gravitated toward the long-haired rugs that resembled shag carpeting. Running her fingers through the fibers of the linen Sam rug, installed on a wall, she described it as ‘’silky but earthy.”

For spare-no-expense luxury, she stopped at F. J. Hakimian, also in Midtown, to see rugs patched together from pieces of 1940s Persian and Turkish kilim panels, in wool, cotton or goat hair, which can be ordered in custom sizes, from long, narrow runners to large living-room rugs.

”Of all the things I get to choose for my clients, rugs are my favorite,” she said. ”It’s like shopping for art.”

Determining quality can be tricky due to the many subtleties in materials, design and craftsmanship. But if you use your wits, you can find a rug that not only suits you and your style but can also become a sound investment.

But before you let a dealer unroll a single rug for you, keep some basic guidelines in mind. For example decide how much you want to spend and where you want to put the rug. If it is going to be in the dining room, you will probably want it bigger than the table, possibly a dark colour to camouflages nasty spills. And just so you don’t come across as a rug noob, call the rug a “carpet” when it is more than 6 ft in length.

Your next decision is whether to buy a modern or an antique rug. Though there are exceptions, the best-quality rugs are either very old or very new but will also be made in the old traditional way, to the opinion of most dealers and collectors- “There has been an effort in the last few years to return to the way rugs were made a century ago,” said Mark Hopkins, president of the New England Rug Society, but that happened to be before the widespread use of chemically treated wool, synthetic dyes and mass production techniques which discouraged weavers’ creativity. “Some of the new rugs are like the antiques in that they are unique, one of a kind, works of art,” said Mr. Hopkins, a retired advertising executive who has a large collection of Oriental rugs.

Prices will vary according to design, provenance and condition, but you can get comparable antique, and new, room-size Oriental rugs for  around £2,000 to £10,000. Rare collector’s rugs, like a 12-by-14-foot Sultanabad, circa 1870, may go for a large sum of around £100,000 to £200,000.

The style developed fairly recently, a result of socio-economic changes. Since the middle of the 20th century nomadic life in Morocco has been seriously on the decline since the production of wool from sheepherding has much been reduced. During the same period, though, Berber culture has come to the attention of the global market, and Berber carpets have been ever more popular.

Faced with a call for increased output and a scarcity of natural materials, Berber weavers have had to rethink parts of their craft. This has meant, among other things, supplementing wool with recycled fabrics and cheap synthetic fibers like nylon and Lurex, and various plastics.

Sisal is a fibre extracted from the leaves of the Agave plant, originally native to Central America and now cultivated extensively in Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.  The Agave plant is very robust, preferring an arid climate; no artificial fertilisers and little or no chemical herbicides are needed for its cultivation. Sisal fibres, which are extremely strong, are shiny and vary in colour from white/cream to pale yellow in their natural state although they can be easily dyed and are generally colourfast.

Spun into a yarn, sisal has been used in rugmaking for hundreds of years, particularly in a tight weave known as boucle, although flat weave and rib patterns are also popular. The result is a rug that oozes natural charm, is durable, anti-static, non-toxic and easy to clean. A regular vacuuming will prevent embedded dirt damaging the fibres, liquid spills should be blotted with a dry cloth, taking care not to rub liquid into the fibre, stains should be blotted with a rag dipped in a solution of soap and water, or vinegar and water, and then blotted dry. Dry cleaning powder is also available for sisal rugs as excessive moisture can have deleterious effects on the fibres. For this reason, sisal rugs are not suitable for bathrooms or other excessively moist or humid environments.