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He’d already been restoring this particular carpet for a month, but that’s only considered a “medium-size job” for the owner of The Golden Horn, an antique-rug restoration service in Port Chester.

“Restoring can take from one week to one year. It can be a big job to fix these rugs. Some are huge, 12 by 18 feet or 18 by 24 feet, and it takes a lot of patience.”

And in addition to patience, it takes creativity, artistic appreciation, nimble fingers and strength to lift 100 to 150 pounds of 100-percent pure, vegetable-dyed wool. These are just a few of the qualities Durmus had to develop in order to build his reputation as an authentic rug restorer working in the old ways his family taught him.

Durmus lives in Ridgefield with his Taiwan-raised wife, Claudia, a Mandarin language teacher at Ridgefield High School, and his trilingual daughters, 8 and 5. But this is a far cry from his beginnings.

“I’m originally from eastern Turkey, and this job goes from generation to generation. There’s no place to go there to learn, you just have to learn when you are little from your parents,” he said, his fingers toying with wool as he continued to hand-stitch his latest project.

Actually, he said, “You don’t even know you’re learning when you’re just growing up in this business.”

Patience required

Durmus laughed, thinking back on his early encounters.

“It is boring, because with this job you just sit down and it’s all stitch by stitch, and when you’re a kid, you don’t have the patience. Slowly, you start enjoying it and then grow to love it. My dad taught me, and this is his business taken to America.”

Durmus started The Golden Horn 15 years ago on Mamaroneck Avenue in Mamaroneck and relocated to his Port Chester store five years ago. He and his four co-workers need this bigger space since they do all of their restoring in-house with materials imported from his homeland. He said doing it all at The Golden Horn gives him “total control” over the final product.

Referring to the rug he’s currently working on, which shows signs of basic wear and tear, Durmus explained, “The hard part is that this carpet is from 1880 and the color’s been faded by the sun and time, so we have to dye the wool to match the color and we do all that here.”