Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
Chattanooga sits on the floor of a river valley with the Cumberland escarpment on one side and Missionary Ridge on the other, and that geography is hard on wool. Damp air settles here and stays. Basements and crawlspaces run wet from November through March. Red clay works down to the base of a pile where a household vacuum has never once reached it. Rugs are collected, washed off site by hand, dried flat, and brought 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 decade of valley summers and wet winters has left 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 musty smell that comes back every wet week is treated in the foundation, not perfumed over.
We collect and return across Hamilton County and the Georgia line. 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 and clay come 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 failed water heater, a split supply line, a basement that took water up one edge. 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 climate does not transfer here. Downtown sits at about 676 feet, one of the lowest elevations in East Tennessee, with the river running through it and high ground on both sides. Air that cools overnight drains downhill and pools on the valley floor, and over fifty inches of rain a year keeps the ground under these houses loaded. Wool is a sponge that happens to be beautiful. The damage builds quietly, then arrives all at once.
Most soaked rugs in Chattanooga never met a river. They met a water heater at the end of its life, a supply line behind a washing machine, a slow leak under a dishwasher, or a finished basement that took water along one wall after a heavy week. The water is often clean when it starts and is rarely clean by the time it reaches the rug, because it has crossed a floor on the way.
What matters is what happens next. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium, and the warmer the room the faster that starts. Drying the surface with a fan leaves the contamination 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 it should be photographed before any of that, because that is what an insurer will ask for.
Off-site washing, hand finishing, and a route that covers the valley and the ridges on both sides of it.
From the brow of Lookout Mountain to the far side of Chickamauga Dam, and south across the state line. 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 this valley floor.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
