Since 1998
A trading store, in the old sense
One family, one building, and a stubborn refusal to sell anything we have not handled ourselves.
The building was a wagon-maker's workshop until 1974. The floor still has the marks where the wheel-lathe was bolted down, which is why the rugs at the front are never laid flat over that corner.
We opened the front room as a rug gallery in 1998 with eleven pieces and a borrowed bakkie. The counter came six years later, mostly because the family who farmed next door kept arriving with more lamb than they could sell and nowhere to put it. Neither half was a business plan. Both are still here.
What has not changed is how we buy. Every rug is chosen in person, paid for by us, and shipped by us. We are not agents and we do not take pieces on consignment, which means when we tell you what something is, we have no reason to say anything other than the truth about it.
How we buy
Three trips a year, and a lot of walking
We go, we look, we haggle badly, and we ship a container. Nothing arrives here through a distributor, and nothing sits in a warehouse in Johannesburg first.
- We handle every piece. Knot count, dye, condition, repairs already done to it. If a rug has been re-piled we will tell you where.
- Written provenance with the sale. Region, approximate age, materials and what we paid attention to. On paper, signed.
- No invented ages. If we do not know, the label says roughly. The trade is full of rugs that gained forty years somewhere in transit.
7 daysto live with a rug before you decide
On approval
Take it home. Light is the whole argument.
A rug that sings under our north-facing windows can go flat and grey in a room that faces the other way. So any piece over R5,000 goes home with you for a week, within an hour's drive, at no charge.
We take a copy of your ID and a signature. We do not take a deposit and we do not take card details. Bring it back on the eighth day if it is not right, and there is nothing to argue about — roughly one in four comes back, and that is fine.
Cleaning & repair
We will work on rugs we did not sell you
The wash bay is behind the counter. It is not a side line — it is most of what we do between November and February.
Wash
Cold immersion, pH-correct soap, dried flat in the shade over four days. Quoted by the square metre before we start.
Re-fringe
Ends secured and re-knotted in matched cotton. The commonest repair, and the one most often done badly elsewhere.
Re-pile
Moth damage and burns filled by hand in wool dyed to match. Slow, and we will say honestly when it is not worth it.
The other half
Eleven producers within an hour
Everything on the homeware shelves and most of what is on the counter comes from people we can drive to before lunch.
Everything above is easier to believe in person.
Fourteen Bergstroom Road, off the R44 at Klapmuts. No appointment, no pressure.