Rug cleaning in Zaventem

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.

The type of floor changes everything: on an old parquet, a rug traps the mineral dust; on cold tiles, it takes up damp from underneath.

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.

We collect and we bring back: the washing is done flat at the workshop, never with a hose in your living room.

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.

Dogs, children, entertaining, house shares: it is the way people live here that decides how often a rug is washed, not a theoretical calendar.