Curtain Cleaning: We Take Them Down, Wash Them and Put Them Back Up

What we mean by "concierge"

Our price list calls this a concierge service, and the word does not tell you much, so here is the plain version. Someone comes to your house and does the job you would otherwise be doing yourself on a stepladder: unhooking the panels, getting them off the track, and putting everything back once they are clean. You book a time and let us in. That is the whole of your involvement.

There is nothing exclusive about it. It is the same curtain cleaning we do for anyone who carries their panels into the shop, with the ladder work added at both ends for people who would rather not do it.

Why the curtains have to come off the rail

A curtain cannot be properly cleaned while it is hanging. Steaming a panel on the track kills dust mites where the steam touches them, but there is no rinse and no spin, so the dust, grit and cooking oil that loosen settle straight back into the weave. Killing a mite is also not the same as removing it: the dead mite and the faecal pellets around it are still what people react to.

In Singapore that load builds faster than most people expect. Windows open onto road dust, humidity sits near 80%, and a lined or blackout panel holds damp against the glass. That last one is where the musty smell in a curtain almost always comes from, and it is in the backing rather than the face, which is why a curtain can look perfectly clean and still smell.

What happens on the day

We bring our own ladder. The panels come off the track by hand, one at a time, and the hooks come out and stay with us so nothing goes missing between the two visits. Sheers, day curtains and blackout panels are counted and kept in order, so each one goes back on the window it came off rather than a window of roughly the same size.

Most of this work lands in the weeks before Chinese New Year, when the house is being turned out anyway. If that is your plan, book at least a month ahead. The clean itself normally takes about a week, but that is the busiest stretch of our year for curtains, and the queue in front of you is longer than it looks. Leaving it to the fortnight before is how people end up with bare windows on the day.

What happens at our facility

Everything is washed off-site at Queenstown. The wash temperature is chosen for the backing rather than the face fabric, because a blackout or rubberised lining is the part that cracks or peels in domestic heat. The panels are dried under control rather than in a hot domestic dryer, which is what keeps a floor-length drop the length it was, and then pressed.

Cotton and linen are the fibres that move; polyester and most blends are stable. This is the same fibre-by-fibre judgement behind everything else we clean, and we have written up how the method gets chosen separately.

Putting them back up

Second appointment, same job in reverse. Hooks go back in, panels go back on their own tracks, and the drop is checked at the floor before we leave.

Turnaround is five working days and upwards, counted from the day we take the curtains down, and that is exactly how long your windows are bare. In practice that is about a week, though it depends on how many panels there are and what they are made of, and it stretches during peak periods — the run-up to Chinese New Year most of all. We confirm the timing before collection. If privacy matters in one particular room, tell us when you book and we will plan both visits around that room.

What it costs

The cleaning is charged by weight: from $15 per kg for standard curtains and $20 per kg for blackout, minimum $60. Roman blinds are $2.50 per square foot. The full price list has the rest.

The visit itself is from $200 per trip, or 25% of the cleaning total for larger homes, whichever is higher, with hooks and hardware included. We price it per visit rather than per kilo because what it actually costs us is the trip and the labour at each window, not the weight of the fabric.

If you would rather not pay for the visit, take the curtains down yourself and drop them at either shop, and you pay for the cleaning alone. Please take the hooks out first: left in, they have to be removed by hand one at a time and refitted afterwards, and there is a handling fee if we do it for you.

The honest note

Two things are worth knowing before you book. A blackout lining that has already spent years in sun, dust and humidity can delaminate in the wash, and that is not always visible beforehand, which is an argument for cleaning curtains regularly rather than once the coating is spent. And a panel that has never been washed can move slightly in length the first time, cotton and linen most of all.

If something looks too far gone to survive a clean, we would rather say so on the ladder than after it has been through the machine.