Scroll back through all the things this website has said about washable rugs over the past few years and you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d taken an entire U-turn on the subject. Actually, we sort of have. Reading the old reviews it’s like we were begrudgingly performing a favour by even acknowledging they were a thing, okay for a hallway, okay at a rental but nothing you’d throw down while still expecting guests to treat your apartment with respect. Kind of how you feel about a fold out sofa bed, same tolerant generosity. Nobody was treating one like they were okay to put in your living room. Expectations have changed quite a bit since then.
Rather spectacularly, if I’m honest.
A chunk of that is history repeating itself faster than we can say “well actually.” Two dogs.
Toddler who uses red wine being spilled as a personality quirk.
Someone’s football boots taking half the garden centre’s Sunday pitch selection with them wherever they go. The old editorial line couldn’t have survived first contact with any of the above. You can only stubbornly cling to “dry-clean-only sorts only” till you find yourself living with kids and pets that actually shred/shed/spill said dry-clean-only sorts so thoroughly you start questioning your life choices.
And turns out that’s basically everyone who lives here.
You Might Also Like
What we’re still divided on is whether they really look like rugs or just what you get if you take the idea of a rug, Photoshop out all the details that aren’t infinitely relaxed about getting destroyed and then iron the living shit out of it.
There’s people who will happily argue the good ones now genuinely stack up next to wool in looks department and you’d have to squat down to inspect super closely to tell them apart.
Then there’s people, chief amongst them me, who will bring up that one rug with the fringe that never quite sat the same after wash number three and you’ll know we’re getting old.
None of which will matter if the washable bit lives up to its end of the bargain and – here’s the thing – it does. Rinse, repeat, reclaim your evening. Throw it in the machine, forty degrees, done, down again within twenty-four hours. No finicking, no ruined rugs, no Sunday afternoons.
We’ve also finally stopped saying they’re a halfway house option until you’ve somehow scraped together enough disposable income for the “proper” version. Trying to pretend a rug is somehow lesser than the rugs we normally slap praise all over just doesn’t fit with the ones we’re currently buying, and before you know it that whole sentence had vanished from our reviews. The argument wasn’t lost, we didn’t sit down and decide to stop saying it, it was quietly dropped because nobody could substantiate it anymore.
The sense we’ve currently landed on, some three years and hundreds of them later, is that washable rugs stopped being a compromise option so long ago it didn’t matter that they’ve now somehow become the one rug still on the floor while we rotate three “better” ones weekly, chuck them in the loft “for now” and promptly forget about them. Inexpensive to replace if they do get wrecked, easy to forgive new stains on and yet still, some miracle, the one everyone accidentally complimenties before they realise your priorities.
It’s the last bit our opening salvoes never expected. That convenience would quietly linger longer than any of our year-old aesthetic prejudices.
Top Picks
