Talking Family and Rugs with the Owner of the Santa Barbara Design Center
By Roger Durling
Sun Nov 03, 2019 | 9:43pm
“We’ve won Best of Santa Barbara for 25 years,” says Santa Barbara Design Center owner Michael Kourosh. “I take pride in my kids and on that achievement.”
Located on Olive Street, the Design Center showcases more than 25,000 square feet of high-quality furniture, rugs, fabrics, and home accessories. “We’re a destination,” says Michael. “We’re the largest home furnishing store in Santa Barbara County.”
To say Kourosh is a character is an understatement. He’s one of the most disarmingly funny people I have met. As he joins me for lunch, I ask him if he’s okay sitting across from me. “I’m a camel jockey,” he retorts in a charming Middle Eastern accent. “I can sit anywhere.”
His rapid-fire, quick-witted phrases and non-sequiturs have me laughing out loud as I interview him. “I do not have filters,” he says. “It’s a blessing to my soul. I don’t say bad stuff, but I’m honest. I also make amazing coffee.”
Michael was born in Iran. His father was an industrialist who built buses, but he lost his company when the Islamic revolution began. In 1986, during the Iran-Iraq war, Michael’s mother sold all of her jewelry and sent him to Germany. “My mom didn’t want me to die in that stupid war,” he says.
He went to live with his uncle, who was a rug merchant near Hamburg. “I’d go to school in the morning and in the afternoon, I’d help in my uncle’s store,” explains Michael, who studied physics at Hamburg University because his family had been into mathematics. He came to Santa Barbara in 1990 to visit cousins, and fell in love with the place. He returned to Germany to pack his bags, returning six months later to stay permanently, learning better English at SBCC.
He noticed there were no rug stores on State Street, so opened Rugs and More, which thrived for 23 years. Rugs run deep in his family. His grandfathers were collectors, and he grew up watching them give fine rugs as wedding presents. When he asked why, his grandfathers would respond, “They will spend the money. They will forget the trip. But they will have the rugs forever.”
Michael believes rug-weaving is the oldest art form. “It has a resonance,” he says. “It has a real vibration with people. I know all of the symbols. They’re the hardest art form to create. In the next 20 years, they won’t be making them anymore.”
In 2011, he moved to his business to Olive and Guiterrez streets — a commercial area now being called the Haley Corridor — and renamed it the Santa Barbara Design Center. “It was a neglected neighborhood,” he recalls. “We were the first high-end store in it. Since then, it has been flourishing.”
You can read the full article on the Santa Barbara Independant website.