A lot of the upholstery in Moultonborough is older than the cleaning codes printed on furniture tags, and some of it is better built than anything you can buy today. That’s a reason to be careful with it. It isn’t a reason to leave it dirty.
Thomas Plant made his money in shoes, bought several thousand acres on the flank of the Ossipees, and had a Boston firm build Lucknow up there in 1913 and 1914. People call it Castle in the Clouds now and drive up to tour it. That’s the far end of a pattern that runs through the whole town — Moultonborough has been where people with money built the good house for well over a century.
The numbers still say it. The town counts roughly thirty-seven hundred second homes against about eighteen hundred year-round ones, better than two to one. And when a few years of building permits were tallied, only about one in ten was for new construction; the rest went to refurbishing and adding on. This is a town of houses being kept rather than replaced. The furniture inside them gets kept too.
So we see pieces that came up from Boston or down out of a grandmother’s house. Horsehair and cotton under old wool. Down-filled cushions. Silk gone brittle in a south window. Frames built before anybody thought to sew a W or an S onto a tag. And right alongside them, a sectional from last spring that the dog has taken possession of. Both get cleaned. Neither gets cleaned the same way.
If a piece has no cleaning tag at all, that’s information rather than a gap — it usually means the furniture predates the code system entirely. Leave it be and let us test it. Most of the damage we get called about was done by somebody being helpful with a wet cloth.
We look underneath first. Turn the cushion over, check the deck, find the tag if there is one. W means a water-based cleaner is fine, S means solvent only, SW means either, and X means vacuum and nothing else. X is not a formality — water on an X-coded fabric can shrink it or ring it permanently. No tag at all means we test in a spot nobody will ever see, and we watch what comes up on the white towel.
Dye testing comes next, and it matters far more on old goods than new ones. Vegetable dyes move. Early synthetics move. Silk moves. A sun-faded arm and a protected back on the same chair can behave like two different fabrics entirely. If a dye bleeds on the test we tell you and switch to a low-moisture method, or we tell you the piece is better off left alone. That costs us the job now and then. Fine.
Down and feather cushions get handled on their own terms. They take on water, they’re slow to give it back, and a down cushion zipped shut while it’s still damp will mildew from the core out and smell for the rest of its life. We work light, extract hard, and leave them open with air moving across them. If a cushion feels heavy when we’re finished, it isn’t finished.
A standard sofa runs $90–$150; chairs and loveseats come in under that. Antique and delicate pieces get quoted after we’ve had our hands on them, because the honest number depends on what the test tells us. Fabric protector is optional, and we don’t put it on silk.
Not knowingly. We test a hidden spot before anything else and read what comes back on the towel. If the dye moves, or the fabric has gone thin and papery from years in the sun, we stop and tell you — and sometimes the advice is to vacuum it gently and enjoy it. Old upholstery is easier to ruin than it is to clean.
Then it very likely predates the coding system, which is common in this town. We test a concealed area with water and again with solvent, see which one the fabric will tolerate, and go with the gentler of the two results. It costs an extra twenty minutes and it’s the difference between a clean chair and a damaged one.
They can be cleaned. Moisture control is the whole trick. Down soaks up water and holds it deep in the core, so we work light, extract thoroughly, and leave the cushions open with air moving until they’re dry the whole way through. A down cushion closed up damp will sour from the middle and that smell does not come back out.
Different job, same principles, and yes we do them. Natural fibers need the embedded grit dusted out dry first, the dyes tested, and the moisture kept under tight control. Some rugs clean up well right in the house. A valuable wool or silk one comes out better washed properly off-site, and we’ll tell you which yours is.
A few hours in a heated room for ordinary fabric. Longer for anything with down in it, and longer again in a house that’s been shut up and cold. We’d rather leave a fan running in the room on our way out than tell you it’s fine and have you find out otherwise two days later.
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