Right before we moved into the Laboratory, friends offered us a fantastic area rug that would be perfect in the bedroom, reaching almost to the walls.  It looked like a rug you might see in one of brilliant Mexican Architect Luis Barragan homes: dense, neutral, subtly cozying and softening modern lines. (Barragan also famously favored pink walls.) In our rug, twice as much wool as usual was threaded into the warp making it luxuriously dense and incredibly heavy. We arranged for movers to deliver it and lay it down the day before the bed and the rest of our furnishings were to arrive. Having it cleaned first had not crossed our minds.

Once laid down we discovered that the glorious rug had a few less-than-pristine-spots, normal for a light colored rug that had actually been used. What to do? Moving the bed and having the rug picked up to be cleaned would be a real chore and expensive. We wondered if there were other solutions. How DO you clean a rug at home, especially a really thick wool one? We knew that actually washing it would be problematic; water could impact the color and make it difficult to dry properly.

We discovered that Dyson makes a proprietary powder called Dyson Zorb Carpet Maintenance Powder designed to dry clean rugs using a Dyson vacuum cleaner. We wondered if it would work with our cheap, noisy, trusty, Mighty Mite. WHY wouldn’t it? Could a Dyson Vac’s “suck” be that different? We read the instructions and improvised our own method, using a toothbrush to gently work the powder into the fibers of a small, hidden patch of the rug. We left it a half hour and then vacuumed. Voila. Dyson’s Zorb WORKED, removing both stains and dinge; it perked that fab rug right up.

(Since our rug doesn’t photograph well, we’ve included images of Barragan’s interiors, with rugs, for maximize inspiration.)

Here’s a glimpse of the rug we cleaned, which looks much better in person than in photos:

Top photo: Steve Silverman; bottom photo Aarón Martínez Ornelas