Rugs in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert: buying, restoration, cleaning

The building stock

Only 12% of the housing stock predates 1919: Woluwe-Saint-Lambert was built in the twentieth century, and the flat dominates there. Average household of 2.03 people, 47% single-person households (2022). What that means for a rug: few of the large formats of a town house, many living-room and bedroom rugs in standardised rooms, and narrow lift cars in the blocks of the 1960s and 1970s.

In a block of the 1960s and 1970s the lift car measures less than the rolled rug: it then goes down the stairs, carried by two people, without being folded. We check that point by telephone before setting the collection for washing.

What the buildings tell us

The Kapelleveld garden city was built from 1923 to 1926 to a plan by the town planner Louis Van der Swaelmen, with the architects Huib Hoste and Antoine Pompe — a listed modernist ensemble, with small rooms and steep stairs, where rugs are laid on original floorboards.

Small rooms, steep stairs, original floorboards: at the Kapelleveld, a rug wetted on the spot would damage the wood. We take it away, we wash it flat and we put it back dry, in exactly its place.

Damp and water

The town itself identifies as flood-risk areas, on the floor of the Woluwe valley: the boulevard de la Woluwe, the cours Paul-Henri Spaak, the rue Voot, the Hymans-Vandervelde tunnel, the Woluwe Shopping, the place Saint-Lambert, the Roodebeek metro station and the rue de la Station de Woluwe. It has 40,500 m³ of retention basins. This is not an accident of the terrain: the moulin de Lindekemale, on the northern edge of the parc Malou, turns on the Woluwe and is mentioned as early as 1129 — it is the oldest surviving watermill in the Region. A rug stored in a cellar on those streets is a job that comes in sooner or later.

Boulevard de la Woluwe, rue Voot, place Saint-Lambert: in those streets a cellar always ends up taking in water. A rug that has been sitting there is treated quickly — extraction, rinsing, drying flat — or it comes apart.

Collection

Municipal parking is divided into blue zones (2 hours free with the parking disc), grey (4 hours 30 maximum), orange (2 hours maximum) and green (unlimited but paid), all in force from 9.00 to 18.00 Monday to Saturday according to the signs, with the first quarter of an hour free in the paid zones. Four streets are even reserved for residents only, on pain of €50 per half-day. For a collection, that means a real window of two hours in front of the door, no more.

Depending on the zone, we have two hours in front of your door, no more, and four streets are reserved for residents only. So the collection is prepared: rugs cleared, furniture moved aside, and the loading done in one go.

Who lives here

4,405 officials of the European institutions live in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert (2022 figures, IBSA). The three leading foreign nationalities are French (3,516), Italian (2,215) and German (1,517), for 38% foreign residents in 2022 and 40.3% in 2025. Added to that are the École européenne Bruxelles II (rue Oscar Jespers 75) and the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc with the UCLouvain Bruxelles Woluwe campus (avenue Hippocrate 10): two hubs that feed a population of international families and doctors with a high turnover — hence rugs that move house, go into storage and are resold.

International families and doctors on rotation: the rugs here move house, go into storage for a few months, then leave again or are resold. We wash and wrap before storage, and we buy for cash what does not leave again.

The rug market

Four weekly markets structure the town: the Meudon market on the avenue Georges Henri on Wednesdays from 15.00 to 20.00, the marché des saveurs on the Tomberg on Thursdays from 15.00 to 20.00, the place Saint-Lambert market on Saturdays from 8.00 to 13.00, and the organic Gué market on Saturdays from 8.30 to 12.00 — the first organic market in the Brussels Region. This is the local fabric of a town where furniture and rugs are handed down more than they are hunted out.

Rugs here are handed down more often than they are hunted out: they come from a family, they have served twenty years and they call for a real wash, sometimes some work on the fringes. That is the job we do most in the town.