Submersion washing, dye testing and controlled drying are what a hand-knotted rug is built to survive. Carpet equipment is not: it wets the pile, leaves the foundation soaked and returns a rug that has bled, browned or lost its ends.
Construction comes before method. A flatweave, a silk-piled city carpet and a heavy village wool each want different water, a different temperature and different handling. Between them these twelve traditions account for nearly every rug in a Richmond house.
Whoever takes a rug in inspects it, washes it, dries it and carries out any repair. Nothing is subcontracted out mid-job to somebody who never saw it arrive.
Several pounds of dry soil can sit in a wool rug before anyone would call it dirty. It works down to the bottom of the pile where a vacuum cannot follow, and from there it behaves like sandpaper underfoot. Hardwood makes it worse: grit that would bed down into carpet stays loose on a hard floor and keeps circulating back into the rug.
Washing by immersion lifts that load out through the foundation rather than pressing it further in. Dye stability gets checked first — a rug that runs under hot water and detergent cannot be put back the way it was.
Richmond has two housing stories and they send us two different kinds of rug. The Fan and the older Church Hill streets are Victorian row houses with hardwood through most of the plan and original heat in many of them. Windsor Farms and the estate streets of the 1920s and 1930s have the room sizes that inherited Persians were bought for. Out west in Short Pump and Glen Allen the rugs are newer, larger and more often machine-made.
What they share is the swing. Fifty-three freezing nights a year mean a long heated season, and 36 days above 90 at the other end. Wool takes up moisture in August and gives it back in January, and the foundation threads at the ends of a rug absorb that movement. The damp season itself is short — 129 humid days, with the longest unbroken run about three weeks — so outright rot is rarer here than in the Carolinas. Rugs arrive out of square instead, or smelling of the basement they spent the summer in.
Send the approximate size and whatever you know about where the rug has been living — hardwood, a basement, a room that runs on radiator heat all winter. We’ll answer with an estimate and a pick-up slot. No figure is settled before the rug has been measured and inspected in person.