Immediately, you are on guard. Because here in the sunlit foyer of Peter Pap Oriental Rugs on Route 101 in Dublin, the quiet indicates seriousness. To your right is a long corridor flanked with white pillars and cream-colored walls, incrementally interrupted by hanging, oriental rugs. These are better described as rectangular woven wonders, each about 100 years old, and each crafted by the deft hands of nomads and weavers from Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey and southern Russia.
     More rugs rest lazily on the dark wooden-planked floor, like tired debutantes. Others are coiled like architectural plans in a corner of the foyer.
     You know they are expensive: the price tags say so.
     Years of experience have taught you that, yes, you’ve just  encountered a “no-touch zone,” like at the Smithsonian when your 6th-grade teacher swatted your hand from an ancient Mayan vase.
     So you’re startled when Pap himself — a fit, 50-year-old with barely graying hair — dashes all your insecurities by unfurling a  rug and plopping it on the floor.
     Then, he steps on it.
     Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re thinking: Isn’t this thing worth thousands of dollars?
     Indeed, but Pap smiles coolly and says, “That’s what they’re made for,” then bends to explain how this one differs from that one.
     Not to be mistaken: this man, who’s been in the antique rug business for nearly 30 years, wouldn’t welcome a parade of muddy feet trampling on any of the 2,000 rugs housed between this gallery or his other in San Francisco. But the rugs are meant to be used with care, and also to be studied and appreciated as works of art.
     Each has a story, he says. Each is a tangible lifeline to the past, a history lesson to be realized both in the symbolic designs and in the little mistakes. It’s the awe of how anyone could make something so fine that drew him into the business decades ago.
     With a few dollars in his pocket, Pap managed to cultivate an out-of-home, yard-sale scouring operation into an internationally renowned, bi-coastal outfit.
     There’s no stopping him now.
     “I anticipate doing this ’til I drop,” Pap says.

Peter B. Pap needed a job.
     It was 1974. He was 20 years old, fresh into Boston and newly married.
     Without an ounce of knowledge about oriental rugs, he walked into  Brooks, Gill and Company on Canal Street and finagled a position under owner Richard Kurkjian, a second-generation Armenian rug dealer.
     Kurkjian’s father escaped the Turkish genocide in Armenia and  opened up shop in Boston in 1926. Armenian dealers could be found in  almost every New England town during that era, Pap said.
     This morsel of history gave him an inkling as to the colorful history and personality of oriental rugs, a subject he says was “immediately fascinating” to him.
     “I was intrigued by the older rugs that filtered through the  inventory and found their way to the bottom of the stack,” Pap said.
     Kurkjian taught Pap all about salesmanship and service, which Pap spent years refining as an independent dealer.
     He’s learned to mediate couples with differing tastes. Other times, he plays matchmaker, guiding customers through first and second dates with their rug selections before anyone’s ready to commit.
     “You don’t tell someone what they like; you help them find what they like,” Pap said. “Initially, people expect to fall in love with  something, but it very rarely happens that way.”
     While Kurkjian bestowed business sense on young Pap, Pap used his own nose to figure out that antique rugs were emerging from estates, flea markets and auctions all over New England in the 1970s.
     Not everyone sniffed out a gold mine, but Pap did.
     He used a little money and started small, identifying antique rugs at inexpensive prices and selling them for their actual worth.
     For the next six years, he did that out of his Boston home and then in Royalston, Mass.
     By that time, Pap had two daughters, Ruby and Nica, and his Royalston house was crowded with rugs. In the early 1980s, he rented a small storefront on Roxbury Street in Keene, where the restaurant  “21” is now.
     Keene: hardly the capital of oriental rug buyers, you’re thinking. But for Pap, this place was a bulls-eye.
     Tracing a three-hour radius around Keene, Pap could hit Rutland, Vt., Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., Bangor, Maine, and every nook in between.
     Pockets of old-world dealers had set up stores and sold rugs in those places during in the 1930s, when antique rugs were relatively inexpensive, Pap said.
     People purchased feverishly, particularly traditional New Englanders.
     The novelty wore off in the 1950s and ’60s. By the 1970s — just  when Pap was launching into the market — those post-Depression era folks sold their rugs, or their children inherited them without much interest. Pap caught on to that wave of availability and rode it into the next crest of oriental rug popularity.
     “I was literally driving 50,000 miles a year trying to buy and sell as many and as quickly as possible,” Pap said. “It was a treasure hunt.”
     ‘Like listening to improv music.’
     In 1991, Pap moved his thriving business to Dublin. In 1992, he opened a second gallery in San Francisco, taking over Baktiari Gallery, a well-respected antique rug establishment. Pap now spends most of the year on the West coast, jetting out to  Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France and other European countries twice a year in pursuit of fine rugs.
     “It doesn’t have to come out of a yard sale and it doesn’t have to come out of an estate auction at bargain price,” Pap says. “I started out at the bottom of the food chain and I worked my way to the top of the food chain.”
     A cultural anomaly, Pap has succeeded in a business dominated by dealers with oriental ancestry.
     He exhibits at eight major shows a year, including the prestigious Winter Antiques Show in New York City.
     Dan Scully — of Daniel V. Scully Architects on Elm Street in Keene — has known Pap for 30 years.
     Scully designed the Dublin gallery — what he calls an interpretation of a Turkish bazaar — and several exhibit booths for Pap.
     “There’s a spark in his eyes that’s very sort of wise, and I tend to think of him as serious, serious about his work,” Scully said. “It’s always on his mind.”
     Strolling down a corridor in the “Turkish bazaar,” you see some  rugs that would make a geometry teacher beam.
     Perfect symmetry, clean yet complicated floral designs, are  typical to many of these rugs, plush perfections made in workshops around southern Russia.
     In the workshops, one weaver or several would work on a loom, tying individual knots from left to right on vertical warp threads.
     But Pap gravitates to rugs that were woven by villagers or  nomads, ones with little quirks and visible mistakes.
     “I much prefer a rug where a weaver sits down with no diagram ... and weaves a pattern from her grandmother learned over generations,” Pap says.
     Though people are often seduced by rich, symmetrical rugs, Pap prefers the unpredictable, like a salmon-colored rug that has an uneven number of flowers on its border.
     “This one was probably made by one woman in her house, probably sold in the marketplace and was probably supplementing her agricultural income,” Pap says.
     Studying imperfect rugs can be like listening to improv music, he says.
     “If you know what end they started at and how they changed midstream, you can see how they changed motifs in the middle.
     That’s where the charm comes in.”

Pap was born in Vienna, Austria, to American parents.
     Arthur, his father, was a philosophy professor and writer teaching abroad for a year.
     Pap grew up in Hamden, Conn., — just outside New Haven — with his father, mother, Pauline, two brothers and a sister. Pauline steered her children to many New York City museums and plays, which Pap says influenced his love for art.
     At Hamden High School, Pap gravitated to jazz music. He preferred the riffs of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk over formal education.
     So he enrolled at Woolman Hill, an alternative school in Deerfield, Mass.
     “It was just what I needed,” Pap said. Woolman was unstructured, Pap said, with an emphasis on farming and the arts. It gave students “a place to operate and become interested in life,” Pap said.
     His Woolman experience prepped him for a move to the central coast of Oregon, where he helped start an agriculturally-based commune, a snapshot into the culture of the 1960s and ’70s.
     After a year-and-a-half in Oregon, Pap bought his first saxophone — used — and decided to move back east to Boston. He wanted to go to the Berklee College of Music, but met his first wife and landed at Brooks, Gill and Company.
     He couldn’t have imagined then that he’d appear on a PBS series called “Antiques Roadshow” — on which he’s been an appraiser for four years — or that he’d be a lecturer at various rug societies and museum groups around the country.
     So, after all his success, why on earth does he still have a gallery in Dublin, also not the antique rug-buying capital of the world?
     “I jokingly refer to it as my field of dreams,” Pap says. “It’s something that I built. It’s a sentimental favorite for me.”
     Pap, who divorced years ago, married Terry Pap. They spend summers in Dublin with their four-year-old son, Jared. Pap enjoys golf and still picks up the sax every now and then, but rugs remain his passion. It’s taken “total obsession” to get to this point, Pap says, an emotion that he feels will help him discover the next great rug. And the next.