About this site
What this reference covers, where the guidance comes from, and what it deliberately does not do.
This is a reference site about caring for upholstery, carpets and soft furnishings.
What it covers
The reasoning behind the choices, rather than a list of instructions. Why the cleaning code on a label decides whether water is safe on a fabric. Why stains divide into groups that need opposite treatments. Why the two faults people complain about most — a mark that returns a day later, and a brown tidemark that was not there before — are usually caused by the cleaning rather than by the spill.
The glossary carries the vocabulary, because most of the confusion in this subject is vocabulary confusion first.
What it is not
It sells nothing. There is no cleaning service here, no quotes, no prices, no booking and no callout. Nothing on the site is an offer.
It does not recommend a company. Where a page says a job is worth handing to a professional, that is a statement about the job, not an endorsement of anyone.
It is not a substitute for the label. Manufacturers specify what their fabric tolerates, and where this site and a care label disagree, the label wins.
A note on testing first
Almost every method described here should be tried on a hidden area before it goes anywhere visible — inside a skirt, under a cushion, on the back of an arm. Colourfastness is a property of the individual dye lot, not of the fabric type, and the only reliable way to know how a particular piece behaves is to try it somewhere that does not matter.