No two injuries answer to the same remedy. An ember from the fireplace, fringes thinned by decades of footsteps over the parquet, a selvedge coming undone, moth galleries hidden beneath a console table — these we retie strand by strand until the eye can no longer find them. A foundation left to rot under standing water, or a synthetic dye that has crept into the very core of the knot, marks the honest limit of what can be brought back. Exactly where that line falls, we tell you at the assessment — long before a single euro changes hands.
And every assessment begins face-down. Turn the rug over and the reverse tells the truth the pile keeps hidden — the tightness of the weave, the count of the knots, the real condition of the warp. Done properly, rug repair in Paris starts with that single gesture: reading the structure from behind, so it is a weaver's trained eye, never a quick glance at the surface, that rules on what can still be saved.
Paris holds the densest concentration of valuable rugs in France, and they lead hard lives. Heirloom Persian pieces stretched across the parquet of Haussmann apartments in the 16th, 7th and 8th arrondissements endure central heating that dries the fibres all winter; embassy residences host receptions that grind grit into the pile; and the older the building, the more likely a water leak from the floor above. A family rug that has crossed three generations deserves a workshop, not a quick fix.
Two recent pieces tell the story. From Passy, in the 16th, a 1930s Kerman inherited with a grandmother's apartment arrived with moth galleries hidden under a sideboard's footprint: we decontaminated it, rebuilt the weft and reknotted the pile in matching wool — seven weeks of work, and the damage is now impossible to find. From an avenue near Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Sarouk soaked by a burst pipe upstairs reached us with running reds and a weakened foundation: we stabilised the dyes, rewove the rotted section and handled the insurance claim from first photo to final signature.
“A family rug is not waiting to be replaced — it is waiting to be given back the years it can still live.”
