Center Harbor was a hotel town before it was anything else, and the village still looks it. Thirteen buildings sit in the historic district along the shore. A lot of what’s inside them is upholstered, old, and worth taking slowly.
For most of the 1800s this was where the lake steamers tied up and the stagecoaches turned around. The Senter House was the big hotel on Winnipesaukee in its day. It burned in 1887. The library went up on its site, and later the post office and town office. Across the way the Coe House — Glencoe, built in the early 1820s and given a Victorian makeover in 1850 — entertained Presidents Grant and Cleveland. Not a sentence you can say about many front parlors.
Walk the district now and you get Dearborn Place from 1867, the mansard roof on Sutton Place, the 1837 Congregational Church that was literally jacked up in the 1880s so a vestry could go in underneath. Sutton Place had a bad fire in 1993 and was brought back; it’s a bed and breakfast now. That’s the general character of the village. Old houses people have chosen to restore rather than replace.
And the furniture follows. Horsehair settees. Wing chairs that have been recovered twice. A camelback sofa in a parlor that guests sit on all summer. Then, out on the lake roads, the other end of things — a sectional that’s taken fifteen seasons of damp swimsuits. Both need cleaning. They don’t need the same cleaning.
If a piece has a story — a great-grandmother’s settee, a chair that came with the house — tell us before we start. We’ll test longer and use less.
We start with the cleaning code if there is one. W, water-based is fine. S, solvent only. SW, either. X means vacuum and leave it alone. On a piece that’s older than its tag, or never had one, we test a hidden spot under the deck or behind a cushion and watch what the dye and the fiber do. That test decides everything after it.
Wool, silk blends, velvet, old cotton damask — these get low moisture and cool water, because heat and soaking are how fabric shrinks, browns, or loses its nap for good. Synthetic performance fabric on the porch set can take a real scrub. A guest-room chair in a B&B usually wants something in between, and quick. Innkeepers can’t have a room down for a day while a seat cushion dries.
So we use an upholstery tool, not a floor wand. More passes, less water. Cushions come off and stand on edge. And now and then the answer is no — a fabric that bleeds in the test, or a seat so fragile that wet cleaning would finish it. We’ll say that plainly. Better you hear it from us than find it out afterward.
A standard sofa runs $90–$150, with chairs and loveseats under that. A parlor set or a full guest room of furniture gets one combined number once we’ve seen the fabric. If a piece shouldn’t be wet-cleaned, telling you so costs nothing.
Sometimes. Horsehair and old wool usually tolerate a careful low-moisture cleaning on the surface fabric, but the stuffing underneath should never be soaked. We test first. If the fabric is brittle, the dye moves, or the piece really belongs with a conservator, we’ll tell you and won’t touch it.
Usually just a few hours. Lightly wet fabric on a chair or headboard dries quickly with a window open and air moving. Dense seat cushions take longer. We can schedule early in the day, finish your guest rooms first, and tell you room by room when each one is ready.
Most of the time. Foam and fabric hold humidity, and a lake house closed and reopened breathes that back out. Cleaning and drying the cushions properly takes care of the usual mustiness. If mold is actually growing in the foam, the cushion needs replacing, not cleaning, and we’ll show you.
Carefully. Velvet’s pile crushes and marks easily, and cotton velvet can water-spot. We test, use very little moisture, and brush the nap back while it dries. Synthetic velvets are easier. Silk velvet we generally pass on. That’s a job for a specialist, and we’d rather say so.
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