The workshop

Four trades, one place

Buying first: it is our main activity, and the one that calls for the most judgement — recognising an origin, a knotting, a dye, and naming a price. Then hand washing: mechanical dusting, colourfastness test, neutral soap bath, rinsing until the water runs clear, spinning, drying flat. Then restoration: fringes, selvedges, holes, reweaving of warp and weft, moths, colour retouching. Finally fitted carpets, which are another trade altogether — on site, by machine, in offices and hotels.

These four activities call on one another. A rug we buy almost always goes through the wash. A rug being restored is washed before the repair, never after. A fitted carpet in an office often brings the meeting-room rug with it. That is why they belong in one workshop rather than in four businesses.

We look at the back before the front

Everything starts with a diagnosis, never with a quote. And the diagnosis starts with the back: that is where the knotting, the density, the material of the foundation, the old repairs and the true state of the structure can be read. The front tells you what you see; the back tells you what you have.

There is a sentence we say often: this one is not worth restoring. When the cost of a repair exceeds a third of a rug's market value, the operation becomes questionable — we say so before the quote, not after the invoice. A customer who has been told no comes back with the next rug.

There is no square-metre rate in restoration. The price follows the number of knots to be redone, and that number depends on the knot density, the material, the number of colours to be matched and where the damage is. From photographs, a costed answer within 48 working hours.

Buying, first of all

We buy hand-knotted rugs: Persian, Turkish, Caucasian, Afghan, Indian, Chinese, Moroccan, and kilims. Including damaged ones, including incomplete ones, including the ones nobody knows what to do with in an estate.

Payment is made on the day of collection. In Belgium, no cash payment may exceed €3,000, in either direction: that is article 67 of the Act of 18 September 2017 on the prevention of money laundering. So we pay in cash up to €3,000, and by instant transfer or banker's draft above that — the same day. A buyer who offers anything else is not complying with Belgian law, and that is useful to know before letting someone into your home.

In French and in Dutch

Both languages are treated equally, spoken and written. The Dutch on this site is not a machine translation of the French: it is written, and it is written in Belgian Dutch.

You can hear it in the words. A fitted carpet is a vast tapijt, never just tapijt. A selvedge is a zelfkant. A repair is a herstelling and not a reparatie. A hotel, a café and a restaurant all fit inside the word horeca. That vocabulary does not come out of a machine translator: it is the vocabulary of the workshops and the customers here.

Where we travel

The workshop is on the place du Grand Sablon, in Brussels 1000 — a hundred metres from the antiques market held there on Saturdays and Sundays, and six hundred metres from the place du Jeu de Balle. The address is no accident: this is the quarter where oriental rugs have been changing hands in Brussels for a century and a half, and it is where you learn to recognise a piece.

The workshop is in central Brussels. We collect and we deliver in eighteen towns: central Brussels, Ixelles, Etterbeek, Uccle, Woluwe-Saint-Lambert and Woluwe-Saint-Pierre; in the Flemish periphery, Rhode-Saint-Genèse, Overijse, Wemmel, Meise and Zaventem; in Walloon Brabant, Braine-l'Alleud, Waterloo, Rixensart, Wavre and Grez-Doiceau. We also travel to central Antwerp and central Liège.

A rug does not need to be transported by its owner. We come and take it — rolled and upright if it has to go through a narrow stairwell, which is the rule in central Brussels — and we bring it back laid in its place.