Rugs in Wemmel: buying, restoration, cleaning

The building stock

Wemmel grew from 1,285 inhabitants in 1846 to 12,533 in 1970. The Flemish inventory of built heritage reads clear layers there: Art Nouveau, Art Deco and cottage-style terraced houses from 1910-1930 — notably on de Limburg Stirumlaan, with its figurative and floral tile panels —, then uniform interwar housing estates, then post-war modernist and social housing blocks.

Building stock of 1910-1930: original parquet, long narrow corridors, wooden staircases — hence made-to-measure runners and stair runners. Allow too for the van sometimes stopping twenty metres from the door: we carry the rolled rug that far.

What the buildings tell us

Two villa districts structure the town: the domaine du Torentjeskasteel, parcelled out from 1933 and then partly re-parcelled after the war, and the Bouchout district to the north-east, developed after 1958 as an architecturally controlled estate with planned green spaces. A seventeenth-century water tower and the Ronkelhof (eighteenth century) survive.

Large reception rooms, rugs of 3 × 4 m and larger, floors underfloor-heated or tiled since the renovations: these pieces are washed at the workshop, and the private drive lets the van come right up to the front steps.

Who lives here

The 3rd Taalbarometer of the Vlaamse Rand (VUB-BRIO, 2024, a survey of 2,273 residents in 19 municipalities): 37.7% of Rand residents speak only Dutch at home (against 45% in 2019), 23% only French (20% in 2019), and 104 languages are recorded against 87 in 2019. The municipalities with language facilities show the lowest scores for Dutch. One resident in five in Machelen, Vilvorde, Wemmel and Zaventem grew up in a household where neither Dutch nor French was spoken.

More than a hundred languages are spoken in the Rand, and you can reach us in French as well as in Dutch. The rugs brought back from Turkey, Morocco, Iran or Pakistan that sleep in families here are often a matter of buying or restoration, not only of cleaning.

The household profile

Income declared in Wemmel for 2022: an average income of €42,480 per return and a median income of €30,104, over 9,751 returns, for a total taxable amount of €414,222,056. 30% of households are single-person.

Villas and small flats sit side by side in the same town: we do the home valuation of an old piece just as readily as the washing of a single living-room rug. Both requests are handled here every week.

Collection

Wemmel adjoins Jette and Laeken directly; only the R0 ring road, opened in 1957, separates the south of the town from Brussels — the heritage inventory speaks of a "totally urbanised" fabric morphologically welded to the capital. Some ten kilometres and ~25 min from the Grand-Place. Works under way: "Herinrichting Ring Noord", which is rebuilding the R0 from the E40 at Grand-Bigard to the E40 at Woluwe-Saint-Étienne in four zones; the Zellik-Wemmel section comes after Vilvorde and Grimbergen.

Some ten kilometres, and Wemmel adjoins Jette: the collection can be done the same day. We come in via Jette rather than the R0 at peak times, the Ring Noord works being what they are, and your rugs reach the workshop without a detour.

Access and parking

Wemmel is in no low-emission zone: Flanders has only two, Antwerp and Ghent. On the other hand, the van setting off from Brussels centre crosses the Brussels LEZ, which since 1 January 2026 has banned Euro 5 diesel and Euro 2 petrol vehicles, vans included; a €350 fine if the vehicle is not brought into compliance three months after the warning letter.

Wemmel is in no low-emission zone, but our van crosses the Brussels LEZ again on the way back to the workshop: it is compliant. A rug collection agreed here never falls through over a question of access.