Rug cleaning
in Albany.

Albany took shape as a grid of small lots between the bay flats and the base of the Berkeley hills, and most of the single-family houses in Memorial Park and the blocks around it went up in a short burst in the late 1920s — Craftsman bungalows and Spanish Revival cottages built before the Depression stopped the building boom cold. Those are the rugs we handle most often here: older wool pieces, inherited through a couple of generations, laid over original fir or oak floors that show every water ring a rug has been hiding. On Solano Avenue, the mile-long shopping street Albany shares with Berkeley and its two hundred-odd independently owned shops, turnover runs faster and rugs skew newer and more decorative. Up on Albany Hill, the houses climb the slope for the view and tend to hold larger, room-sized pieces. And at University Village, the UC Berkeley family housing complex on the city’s north side, a rotating population of graduate students and visiting scholars means rugs that are often rented furniture — smaller, synthetic, and in need of the enzymatic pre-treatment more than a hand-wash. Every one of them gets the same twelve-step cold-water immersion at our Newark workshop, picked up and returned by our own crew.

We schedule your pickup ahead of time and confirm it with a call or text; the phone is answered 8am to 8pm, every day of the week. At roughly thirty-three miles, Albany is the closest of our west Contra Costa stops, forty to fifty minutes from Newark by way of I-880 and I-80. The same crew that collects your rug washes it in our Newark workshop and drives it back — never handed off to a third party.