Rug Cleaning & Restoration in Lake Forest, IL

Lake Forest is home to a concentration of significant private rug collections that is unusual even by North Shore standards. The town’s grand estates — many designed in the early 20th century by architects including Howard Van Doren Shaw and David Adler — were built with formal rooms that their original owners furnished with city-quality Persian carpets: large-format Sultanabad and Mahajiran pieces in drawing rooms, Isfahan and Kashan medallion carpets in formal dining rooms, Oushak runners in entry galleries.

Many of those rugs are still in those rooms, now in the hands of the third or fourth generation of the family that originally acquired them. Others have been purchased more recently by Lake Forest residents who understand what they’re buying. In either case, what unites them is that they are not candidates for standard carpet cleaning — and their owners know it.

A conservator, not a carpet cleaner

Our master conservator spent nearly a decade collaborating with conservators on rug projects linked to the Louvre, the British Museum, and the State Hermitage — three institutions whose Oriental rug collections include pieces comparable in age, quality, and fragility to the finest rugs found in Lake Forest homes. The conservation protocols he developed there are the foundation of every cleaning and restoration that leaves Ahmadi Rug’s Skokie facility.

This matters for Lake Forest clients in a specific way: the rugs most common in this market — 19th-century Feraghan Sarouks, formal room-size Tabriz pieces, tribal Qashqai and Bakhtiari work, and early 20th-century Indian city carpets — all have specific vulnerabilities. Wool from this period has different chemistry than contemporary wool. Natural dyes — indigo, madder, pomegranate, weld — behave differently under heat and alkaline chemistry than modern synthetic dyes. A conservator knows this. A carpet cleaner typically does not.

Persian rug repair in Lake Forest

Moth damage, structural wear at traffic areas, fringe deterioration, and foundation damage are the most common repair needs for older Persian and Oriental rugs in Lake Forest homes. We handle all of these in-house, using hand-reweaving techniques that match the original knot count, pile direction, and dye colour of the surrounding pile.

For rugs with significant structural damage — exposed foundation, missing pile sections spanning more than a few square inches, or weakened warp and weft — we provide a written assessment of what’s restorable, what’s stabilisable, and what the likely outcome is for each approach. Lake Forest clients whose rugs have been in families for generations appreciate this transparency before authorising work.

Persian rug restoration in Lake Forest

Full restoration — the comprehensive conservation treatment that addresses a rug’s overall condition rather than a single repair — is appropriate for antique and heirloom pieces being prepared for extended use, insurance appraisal, estate documentation, or sale. Our restoration work includes structural stabilisation, foundation reinforcement where needed, pile restoration, colour work where dyes have faded unevenly, and a full conservation cleaning. All work is documented in writing with before-and-after photography.