RISKY RUG REMEDY
You can change an antique rug’s colour — but with caveats, writes Jeanne Huber.
Q At a moving sale a few years back, I bought a large Oriental rug that’s of high quality but has some faded areas. I wanted to experiment with having a large rug before making a major investment. I realize I like having a rug, but not this one. It doesn’t fit the style of my mid-century modern house, and it is too dark for my taste. I could buy a new rug, but something of a similar quality would be fairly expensive. I have seen DIY websites where people bleach and/or overdye wool rugs. Given the size of this rug (14 by 10 feet), I don’t think I could do this myself. Does it make sense to try to lighten the overall colour and then overdye with a neutral colour such as beige or grey? If so, which companies that do this actually work?
A It is possible to change the colour of a wool rug, including an Oriental-style rug. One process, known as an antique wash, lightens the colours. Depending on how intense the treatment is, the rug might wind up just a little lighter, as if the sun faded the colours over many decades, or its bright colours might become pastels, or it might wind up looking whitewashed and almost devoid of colour.
Rug owners can specify the amount of fading: 10 per cent, 20 per cent, etc. Whitewash is 100 per cent.
Once the antique wash is done, the rug can be overdyed, giving it a different base colour, which can be neutral or even very bright, almost neon. Overdyeing adds a single colour, but because some remnants of the original dye usually remain, the colour isn’t uniform. “We call it airbrush,” said Zia Hassanzadeh, owner of Herat Oriental Rugs in Virginia. It makes the rug look handmade, he said.
But there are some serious caveats you should be aware of. The antique wash weakens the fibres, shortening the life of a rug, said both Hassanzadeh and Hedayat Mukhtarzada, owner of Art Connection Oriental Rugs in Falls Church, Va. An average wool rug should last 100 years, he said, but antique washing “brings it down to 50.” Of course, if you don’t like the rug now, having it look the way you want for 50 years might seem a good trade-off. “That’s why a lot of people do it these days,” Hassanzadeh said.
However, both he and Mukhtarzada said a more immediate concern is that there is no guarantee of what colours you’ll end up with after the antique wash — or even what the texture of the rug will be. “All the colour can come off,” Mukhtarzada said. “Red may turn beige, the blue turns grey.” It’s also possible the reds might turn pink — probably not what you want.
Before you invest that kind of money in a treatment that might not end up the way you want, you should investigate an option you might not be aware of: Consider trading in your rug for one you like better. Sometimes certain companies allow you to swap valuable rugs for ones that aren’t as valuable and pay nothing. The faded areas in your rug might reduce the value quite a bit, or they might not have much impact. Sometimes only the tips of the fibres are faded, so it’s possible to shave them off and make the carpet look good as new.
For The Washington Post