Handmade Rug Cleaning since 1881.

"Handmade" covers an enormous range of rugs — from the most valuable hand-knotted antique Persians to a hand-tufted wool rug from a designer showroom — but every handmade rug shares one important quality: it was constructed by human hands rather than by a machine. That distinction matters for cleaning. Handmade rugs almost always use natural fibers (wool, silk, cotton) that respond to cleaning chemistry differently than the synthetic blends in machine-made pieces. They often use dyes — natural or synthetic — that need testing before any wet cleaning. And in the case of hand-tufted rugs, they have a latex adhesive backing that can degrade if over-saturated.

Fred Remmers Rug Cleaners has been cleaning handmade rugs since 1881. Four generations of family training. We clean every type of handmade construction: hand-knotted oriental rugs (Persian, Turkish, Caucasian, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese), hand-tufted modern designer rugs (Pottery Barn, RH, West Elm, designer-label pieces), hand-hooked wool rugs, and hand-loomed flat-weaves like kilims and dhurries. Each construction gets the cleaning method appropriate for it — never one-size-fits-all chain-store cleaning.

The process for any handmade rug starts with identification. We turn the rug over, look at the back, and identify exactly how it was constructed. That single step decides everything that follows: which chemistry, which water temperature, full-immersion wash or surface only, which drying method. We follow the same patient process on a $300 hand-tufted designer rug as we do on a $30,000 antique Persian — because the cleaning method depends on the construction, not the price tag.