Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
This is a very old city on very low ground. Garden levels sit half a storey below the street in brick that was laid long before anyone thought about a damp course, marsh air saturates overnight on three sides of the county, and the tide moves seven feet or more twice a day a few streets from the squares. Rugs here take damage that has almost nothing to do with anyone walking on them. We collect, wash by hand off site, dry flat, and bring the rug back.
A hand-knotted Tabriz and a polypropylene flatweave off a shelf are not the same object, and they should never meet the same brush. Vegetable dyes bleed. Silk scorches under heat. 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 a run of Lowcountry summers has left down in 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 and synthetics each get their own water temperature, pH and agitation.
Chewed corners, unravelling fringe, moth grazing and split foundations rebuilt by hand.
The smell of a garden-level room is treated down in the foundation of the rug, not perfumed over.
We collect and return across Chatham and Bryan 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 soil 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, moth damage, pet destruction, worn pile 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 king tide across a low yard, the Ogeechee up after three days of rain, or a supply line behind a washing machine on a garden-level floor. 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
Rug care advice written for a dry inland climate does not transfer here. The old town stands on a bluff about forty feet over the river, but the ground it sits on is sand over a high water table, and everything beyond the bluff — the islands, the creeks, the neck down to the Ogeechee — is only a few feet above a marsh that fills and empties twice a day. Close to fifty inches of rain falls in a year, the summer runs hot and wet from June into September, and the houses are timber, brick and heart pine rather than anything that shrugs moisture off.
Some of the soaked rugs on this coast met a named storm. Most of them met something far more ordinary: a spring tide with an onshore wind behind it putting water across a low yard on an otherwise sunny day, a courtyard drain in the Historic District that could not take a summer downpour, a garden-level floor that took water from the street side, or a supply line behind a washing machine. Water that starts clean rarely stays clean by the time it reaches a rug.
Brackish water is its own category. A tide that comes up through a yard carries creek silt and organic matter with it, and the salt it leaves behind is hygroscopic — the fibre keeps pulling moisture back in long after the floor looks dry. Blackwater flooding off the Ogeechee is different again: tannin-stained, so it leaves a brown line rather than a clean one. Either way what matters is what happens next. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium and a warm room speeds that up, which here means every room from April onward. Drying the surface with a fan locks the contamination into 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 squares out to Tybee and down to Richmond Hill.
From the Historic District and the Victorian District south through Ardsley Park, out across Whitemarsh and Wilmington to Tybee, down to Isle of Hope and Skidaway, west to Pooler and on into Richmond Hill. 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 an old house on low ground.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
