Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
Charleston houses stand sideways to the street, so most of what damages a rug here has already crossed a piazza to get to it. Old masonry gives up its own salts into the edge of a rug. A district in permanent renovation sheds alkaline plaster fines into the pile. A rented house changes hands fifty times a year. Rugs are collected, washed off site by hand, dried flat, and brought back.
A hand-knotted Tabriz and a viscose flatweave off a showroom floor are not the same object, and they should never meet the same brush. Vegetable dyes bleed. Silk scorches under heat. Jute browns from its own water. Cotton foundations shrink if they are pulled out of the wash wet and dried under tension. Guessing is how rugs get ruined.
So nothing gets cleaned until it has been looked over: fibre content, dye stability, weave construction, backing, previous repairs, and whatever the house it came out of has been putting into the foundation. Only then does the rug get a method. That inspection costs nothing, it happens before you commit to anything, and if a rug is not worth the cost of cleaning we will say so.
Wool, silk, cotton, jute, viscose and synthetics each get their own water temperature, pH and agitation.
Worn selvedges, shredded fringe, split foundations and grazed pile rebuilt by hand.
Street grit, alkaline building fines and sunscreen residue are three different problems with three different answers.
We collect and return across Charleston and Berkeley counties. You never lift a roll.
Washing, structural repair, and getting water back out of a rug before it becomes a mould problem.
Full immersion hand-washing for Persian, oriental, wool, silk, cotton and modern synthetic rugs. Dry grit comes out before any water is introduced, then the rug is washed, flushed until the water runs clear, and dried flat under moving air.
Rug cleaning detailsFringe replacement, edge binding, grazed pile, pet destruction and missing corners. Reweaving is done with matched wool at matched knot density, so the repair settles into the field instead of announcing itself.
Repair servicesA failed supply line, a roof that let a squall in over a piazza, or a rug that sat on a floor nobody realised was wet. Rugs in that state need flushing and controlled drying, not a fan pointed at them. We extract, decontaminate, dry flat, and document the condition throughout.
Water damage service
Generic rug care advice assumes a house with a front door, a hallway and a doormat. A Charleston single house has none of those in the usual arrangement: it is one room wide, it stands end-on to the lot, and the way in is through a garden gate and up onto a piazza that is neither outdoors nor indoors. Add a historic district under permanent renovation, some of the last cobbled streets in the country, and an enormous short-term rental market packed inside the same few blocks, and the damage patterns here are genuinely local.
Very few of the soaked rugs we collect met a storm. Most met a supply line behind a washing machine, a water heater at the end of its life, a slow leak under a dishwasher, or a piazza door that was not quite shut when the rain came in sideways. A great many more were never obviously wet at all — they were simply laid on a floor that had just been mopped, week after week, through a whole letting season.
What matters is what happens next. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium, and a warm room speeds that up. Drying the surface with a fan leaves whatever the water carried sitting in the base of the pile and produces a rug that seems fine for a few weeks and then does not. The rug has to be flushed, treated, and dried flat with the moisture content actually measured — and photographed before any of that, because that is what an insurer will ask for.
Off-site washing, hand finishing, and a route that runs from the Battery out to Kiawah and up to Summerville.
From South of Broad and the French Quarter across the Ashley to James Island, over the Cooper to Mount Pleasant, Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms, down Bohicket Road to Kiawah and Seabrook, and inland to Summerville. Collection is included.
One hand-knotted Persian rug, photographed before and after cleaning.
Send the form and we will come back with a real number. Estimates are free and there is no obligation to book.
How rugs are actually built, how to tell hand-knotted from tufted in ten seconds, and what any of it means for a house on the peninsula or out on the islands.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
