Rug cleaning
in San Mateo.

San Mateo’s housing stock was laid down in layers, and the rugs follow. Baywood went up in the late 1920s and 1930s as period revival houses, Tudor Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival, on wide curving streets, and those rooms were sized for large hand-knotted carpets over hardwood. Hayward Park, subdivided from Alvinza Hayward’s estate, filled in across the first three decades of the twentieth century with Craftsman, Tudor and Mediterranean houses. Aragon and San Mateo Park run to the same period. Bay Meadows is the opposite case: new construction on the old racetrack, open plans, wool flatweaves and hair-on-hide taking daily traffic near the Hillsdale platform. Age decides the wash. A 1920s Sarouk that has spent ninety years on a Baywood floor carries grit deep in the foundation, and its vegetable dyes will move under heat. The weather does not help. Gaps in the ridge channel afternoon wind and fog into San Mateo from late afternoon through early morning in summer, so a rug in the blocks around Central Park stays damp longer than its owner expects. That is where moth and mildew start. We wash cold, by immersion, twelve steps at our Newark workshop. No heat, no harsh detergent, so the lanolin stays in the wool and the dyes stay put. Fringes, selvedges, pet damage and moth activity are assessed before the rug goes into water. Pickup is free across Hillsdale on orders of $150 or more, and the crew that collects your rug is the crew that returns it.

Call (650) 675-8160 and we schedule your San Mateo pickup in advance, then confirm the window within a day. The phone is answered 8am to 8pm, every day of the week. Our own crew arrives, looks at the rug in the room, notes wear, pet damage and moth activity, then rolls and tags it. Nothing is handed to a contractor. The same crew brings the rug back and lays it where it was.