Rugs in Zaventem: buying, restoration, cleaning

Who lives here

24.5% of Zaventem's residents are of foreign nationality (9,113 out of 37,271 on 1 January 2025). In 2020 Zaventem was one of the five municipalities of the Vlaamse Rand — with Machelen, Vilvorde, Drogenbos and Kraainem — where residents of non-Belgian origin make up half the population. In the group of towns in the south-east of the Rand (Kraainem, Tervuren, Wezembeek-Oppem, Overijse, Zaventem), western European expatriates account for 20% and more of the population; the overall estimate is 120,000 to 160,000 expatriates for Brussels and its periphery, of whom around 35,000 Europeans in the Rand.

An expatriate finishing a contract rarely leaves with a rug weighing thirty kilos: they sell it or they leave it behind. We buy for cash before the move, after a valuation at your home.

The household profile

The American Department of Defense school is in Sterrebeek: the Brussels Unit School — formerly the Brussels American School, renamed in 2025 — at J.F. Kennedylaan 1, 1933 Sterrebeek, run by DoDEA, 257 pupils from kindergarten to the final year; the built heritage inventory records an American school established in Sterrebeek as early as 1967. The pupils are the children of DoD staff, American federal officials and defence contractors — that is, of NATO families.

Many rugs bought while on posting in the Middle East or Central Asia have never been appraised: they are often real pieces. We come and value them at your home, free of charge, before the next rotation sends them back into a box.

The building stock

In Sterrebeek the inventory describes rendered façades with cornices from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, in sandstone with quoins, then two waves of villas: the 1920s-1930s on the Lindenberg and around the racecourse (semi-detached single-family houses), then 1950-1970 with a regionalist sprawl around the core, and from the 1970s onwards housing estates on the edges of the castle estates mixing modernist and neoclassical villas. Two eighteenth-century châteaux frame the village: the château de Sterrebeek and Ter Meeren, whose origins go back to the fourteenth century with its keep. The tram line of the 1890s and the Mechelsesteenweg turned this farming village into a "verstedelijkt woondorp" whose inhabitants work mainly in Brussels.

Three types of house in Sterrebeek, three different jobs: narrow corridors and stairs in the late nineteenth-century terraces, chevron parquet in the interwar villas, and original wall-to-wall carpet to treat or to replace in those of 1960-1970.

The population

Brussels Airport lies on Zaventem's territory: 24,383,115 passengers in 2025, around 29,835 people employed directly on the site at the end of 2022 spread across 335 companies, and 84,732 direct and indirect jobs in total according to the study published in September 2024.

The airport corridor lines up company headquarters and hotels: fitted carpet in offices, reception lounges and bedroom corridors. We work on those surfaces at night, when the open-plan floors and the guest floors are empty.

Collection

13 km and about 20 min from the Grand-Place via the E40 and the Ring. The "Herinrichting Ring Noord" works are rebuilding the R0 from the E40 at Grand-Bigard to the E40 at Woluwe-Saint-Étienne, in four zones; the permits for the Zaventem-Machelen-Kraainem section have been lodged and the contractor was due to be appointed at the end of 2026. Sint-Stevens-Woluwe (1932) is hemmed in on the eastern Ring side, and the redevelopment of the Woluwelaan is the subject of a separate project.

Thirteen kilometres, but a Ring saturated at peak times: we offer collection slots for your rugs between 9.30 and 15.30 rather than a vague "during the day". At Sint-Stevens-Woluwe, give us a landmark — satnavs often get it wrong there.

Living with the windows shut

The night flight paths over the periphery have for years set the Flemish government against the Brussels Region; the restriction on night cargo flights on grounds of noise for local residents led DHL Aviation to move its hub to Leipzig/Halle, with a fall in freight in 2008-2009.

Under the flight paths people live with the windows shut: the air barely moves and a rug drying at home takes days. Controlled drying at the workshop makes more sense here, and so does anti-dust-mite treatment.