Rug cleaning
in San Anselmo.

Two things shape the rugs we collect here. The first is the trade. The blocks along San Anselmo Avenue and Sir Francis Drake have carried dealers in period furniture and decorative arts for decades, and the Antiques Legacy co-operative on Sir Francis Drake has traded since 1973 with more than thirty-five vendors under one roof. A rug bought that way arrives with no provenance and no cleaning history, so we test dyes in the field and along the fringe before water touches it; a nineteenth-century vegetable-dyed Caucasian and a chemically dyed reproduction behave nothing alike in a wash pit. The second is water. All but a sliver of the town lies in the twenty-eight-square-mile Ross Valley watershed, and San Anselmo Creek has put the center under repeatedly — five feet deep down the avenue in January 1982, four feet on the last day of 2005, when 140 businesses and 290 homes were hit. The Town calls that low ground the Flatlands. A rug out of a flooded ground floor is a decontamination job, not a cleaning job, and it needs paperwork an adjuster will accept: we photograph on arrival, record fiber, construction and damage, wash cold in full immersion so the dyes hold, and hand you the file. Up on Red Hill and around Sequoia Park the work is quieter — inherited room-size wool, dust and pets.

To arrange a San Anselmo collection, call or text with a rough date; we come back with a window and confirm it before the van is loaded. If the rug came out of a flooded room, say so at the booking and keep it rolled rather than folded. Curb space on the avenue and the creek-side streets is tight, so a line about access saves everyone time. Our own team collects, washes and returns. Phones are staffed 8am to 8pm daily.