Every rug is washed by hand, off site — not cleaned in place with a wand over your floor, and never run through a machine that treats silk like a doormat.
Wall-to-wall carpet is stretched and tacked over a pad. It has a backing that seals it, it drains downward into that pad, and it tolerates a fairly aggressive approach. An area rug is the opposite: open on both faces, sitting directly on your floor, often held together by hand-tied knots on a cotton warp that is more than a century old.
When someone cleans a rug in place with a hot-water wand, three things happen. Soil at the base of the pile gets pushed deeper rather than lifted out. Water goes into the foundation with nowhere to go, and a foundation that dries slowly does not just smell — it browns, because the natural tannins in cotton dissolve and wick to the tips of the pile as the water leaves. And the floor underneath, whether that is tile, a slab or a hundred-year-old board floor, gets a wet rug held against it for a day or more.
Off-site washing exists to avoid all of that. The rug leaves the house, gets its dry soil and grit removed before any water is introduced, is washed and rinsed until the water runs clear, and is dried flat and fast in moving air. Then it comes back.
Six stages, in this order, every time. Skipping any of them is how rugs get damaged.
The rug is opened flat and examined front and back. We identify fibre and construction, log existing damage and any earlier alteration or repair, and swab each colour to see whether the dyes will hold. Findings drive the wash plan, and you are told about anything we find.
Before water, the grit comes out. A rug in a house here holds yard sand, oak litter and years of ordinary dust down at the foundation. Compressed-air dusting and controlled beating shake it loose — the single most important step for how long a rug lasts.
Spots, pet accidents, mildew blooms, tannin blush and traffic lanes are treated individually with chemistry matched to the fibre, then given dwell time. Wool and silk get a neutral pH; synthetics can take something stronger.
The rug is submerged and washed by hand with soft brushes worked in the direction of the pile, so suspended soil floats free instead of being ground in. Immersion is also the only thing that dissolves salts back out of a foundation, which no surface method does. Delicate and unstable-dye rugs get a low-moisture method instead.
Flushing continues until the water runs clear, because leftover detergent is a magnet for new soil. Water is then pulled out mechanically and the rug dries flat under moving filtered air — fast, because slow drying is what causes browning, and never in the sun, which fades dye and hardens wool.
Pile is groomed back into direction, fringe is cleaned and straightened by hand, and the rug is inspected against the intake notes. Anything unresolved is flagged before it is wrapped for delivery.
One hand-knotted Persian rug, photographed before and after cleaning.
If it lies on a floor, it has an appropriate method. Each type gets its own handling.
| Rug type | How we handle it |
|---|---|
| Hand-knotted Persian & oriental | Full immersion wash, dye-tested first. Fringe cleaned by hand. Antique pieces get reduced agitation and extra drying time. |
| Wool area rugs | Neutral-pH immersion wash. Lanolin is preserved rather than stripped, which is what keeps wool resisting soil. |
| Silk & art silk (viscose) | Low-moisture specialist cleaning. Viscose in particular yellows and stiffens if it is over-wet, so it never goes into immersion — and a great many rugs sold abroad as silk are viscose. |
| Cotton flatweaves & dhurries | Washed with tight moisture control and dried under tension so the reversible weave does not pucker or shrink. |
| Jute, sisal & seagrass | Dry or very-low-moisture methods only. These plant fibres brown from their own water and are the fastest thing in a Florida house to mildew. |
| Hand-tufted rugs | Washed carefully around the latex adhesive layer, which is the part that fails with age and produces that unmistakable old-glue smell. |
| Machine-made synthetics | Polypropylene, nylon and polyester take a thorough wash and a stronger pre-treatment. Very good results for the money. |
| Shag, hides & sheepskin | Specialty handling with fibre-specific cleaning agents and hand finishing to bring the loft back. |
The lower St. Johns is tidal and brackish a long way inland, so a house in San Marco or Ortega is dealing with salt water even though the ocean is twenty miles away. Water that backs up on a king tide is shallow, dirty and slightly salty, and salt does not evaporate — it stays in the foundation and keeps that band of the rug damp for years. The signature is a weak, sour stripe along one edge with three sound sides above it. Immersion and flushing take the salt out; nothing applied to the surface touches it.
The creeks here run tea-coloured because they carry dissolved tannin off cypress and oak, and it comes indoors on paws, shoes and fallen leaves. The commoner version comes from the rug itself: cotton foundations contain their own tannins, and a rug that is wetted and then dries slowly from the back sends them up to the tips of the pile, where the water evaporates and the colour stays. That yellow-brown blush looks like dirt and is not, which is why more cleaning never fixes it. It is corrected with the right chemistry and prevented by drying flat and fast.
Urine salts crystallise in the foundation and stay there. Being hygroscopic, they pull moisture back out of the air every time the room gets humid, so an accident from two summers ago goes wet and active again every August. Urine also turns alkaline as it breaks down, and alkalinity is what pulls dye out of wool. The contamination is flushed out entirely, the rug is brought back to the acid side, and discolouration is corrected where the dye underneath survived.
Rugs are collected and washed away from the house, then dried flat in moving air rather than hung wet or dried on your floor.
Dye testing and fibre identification happen before water. Neutral chemistry on wool and silk, stronger treatment only where it is safe.
Duval and St. Johns counties, both directions, included. Furniture gets moved off the rug too.
You get told what we find at intake, what it will cost, and what will not come out. Nothing starts before you agree to it.
Tell us roughly what you have and where you are, and we will get it on the route.
Free estimate, collection included, and a rug that comes back the way you remember it.
Fringe, binding, moth grazing and reweaving — what can be fixed and what it involves.
Repair servicesWhat to do in the first forty-eight hours after a rug takes tidal water, storm water or a leak.
Water damageKnots, fibres, construction, and how to care for all of it in a house on a tidal river.
Read the guide