Rug cleaning
in Portola Valley.

This town voted itself into existence in 1964 to keep the valley low and green, and the San Andreas Fault runs straight through it. Soon after, the council appointed a town geologist and had the ground-movement potential mapped before it would approve much of anything. The houses we collect from sit on that sloping ground, and their floors are boards far more often than slab. Wool moves on a waxed board floor, so we send rugs back on natural-rubber underlay and can add a slip-resistant backing to anything that lives at the head of a stair. Ladera is a case of its own. A housing co-operative bought 260 acres of the former Ormondale ranch in 1946, Garrett Eckbo drew the plan and John Funk and Joseph Allen Stein designed the model houses; roughly 520 homes stand there now. Those post-and-beam rooms take a great deal of afternoon light through full-height glass, and vegetable-dyed wool bleaches along the exposed edge first. We photograph the fade line before washing, so nobody blames the wash for it. Above Alpine Road the pattern shifts again. Rugs from Westridge, Blue Oaks and Portola Valley Ranch arrive carrying oak duff, fine trail grit and burrs picked up on the open space at the doorstep. Those are dusted dry, washed cold to keep the lanolin in the fiber, and returned by our own team.

Give us two or three times that would work and we will hold one, then confirm it the following day; the phone is staffed from 8am to 8pm every day of the week and takes texts. Alpine Road and the lanes climbing off it are narrow, so we come in a van sized for them rather than a box truck. The people who lift your rug into it are the same ones who wash it in Newark and carry it back inside.