Rug buying in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre

Who lives here

Woluwe-Saint-Pierre records the highest equivalised median income in the Brussels Region: €21,221 (2019 tax year), or 34% above the regional median, and a median net taxable income of €31,645 in 2023. 38% of the population is of foreign nationality (2022), led by the French (2,620), Italians (1,529), Spaniards (1,308) and Germans (1,142).

That profile rings us to sell more often than elsewhere: people move away, they inherit, they change their lives, and the rug does not follow.

The building stock

Semi-detached and detached houses are three times better represented there than the regional average, density is only 4,720 inhabitants/km² (2022) — one of the lowest in the Brussels Region — and 67% of the territory is covered by vegetation. The bourgeois building stock was fixed by the laying out of the avenue de Tervueren between 1880 and 1910, on which the Palais Stoclet (no. 279, Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte) has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2009. In concrete terms: large villa drawing rooms, and so rugs of 3 × 4 m and larger, to be taken out through French windows rather than through stairwells.

It is in that building stock that the rugs we buy lie sleeping: interwar attics, reception rooms, landing cupboards.

The rug market

The town organises its flea markets by district rather than as a permanent market: quartier du Centre, Sainte-Alix, Montgomery-Gribaumont, each on one day in the year, to which are added the two Stockel fairs on the place Dumon (Ascension week and the week of 15 August) and the Stockel street sales in spring and autumn. Here an oriental rug is not picked up at a market: it comes out of a house, on the occasion of a move or an estate.

That is the circuit through which a rug changes hands here. We are the direct alternative to it: no waiting, no commission, payment the same day.