I clean a lot of high end couches and furniture. I clean many of the Wineries in the Napa valley, as well as for clients in San Francisco and Marin County. I clean for the Swig family that owned the Fairmont Hotel chain... One of the scary pieces I cleaned last year was a hand printed woodblock linen fabric custom couch made for Benjamin Swig in the 1940's....all down pillows inside and with ripe old seams. It was at the country house on 500 acres in Sonoma County. One of the grand kids came out of the pool and sat on the cushion and browned it. I studied cleaning it for about 16 months. No one else around here is stupid enough to touch it. The worst part was removing the pillows, bagging them in plastic, reinserting them for fabric shape stability and repeating to remove bags when dry. I extracted this with a reducing solution and got the brown out. Whew!
Another scary piece was Robert Mondavi's suede love seat in his office. After he died the winery wanted to move it to the Mondavi museum. He ate his lunch there for about 50 years and missed his mouth a few times in the process. As you know, you can't wet clean suede without staining it. I brought it home, put on my respirator, got out my Black and decker Mouse orbital sander and a variety of sandpaper grits and erased the stains. Easier than I thought.
. I regularly clean Fitzgerald, McGuire, Henreon, Karges, Baker, Ron Mann. Robert Lucarini, Eames....
I spent ten years making art glass and selling it in galleries, took a lot of graduate art classes....good training for upholstery cleaning.
View attachment 1602
