I turned down a job on Cross Street in Islington last spring. Sisal stair runner, twelve treads, a red wine spill on the fourth one, and the owner wanted it steam cleaned because that is what she had done to the wool carpet upstairs and it came up perfectly. I explained why I would not, she went elsewhere, and somebody with a machine and fewer scruples did the work. The runner is still there. It is now three centimetres narrower than the stair and there is a tan ring around where the wine used to be, which is a good deal more visible than the wine ever was.
That is the trade in miniature. The thing that saves a wool carpet destroys a sisal one, and the difference is not degree – it is category.
What are you standing on when you buy sisal?
A plant, more or less unchanged. That is the whole point of these floors and the whole problem with them.
Sisal comes from the leaves of Agave sisalana, grown mostly in Brazil and East Africa, crushed and scraped to strip out the pulp and leave the fibre bundles. Jute is a bast fibre, taken from the stem of Corchorus plants grown in the Ganges delta, retted in water for weeks until the bark separates. Seagrass is a marine grass cultivated in paddy fields in southern China, flooded with sea water during growing, then dried and spun into a hard cord. Coir is coconut husk. Abaca is a banana relative from the Philippines.
Wool is also a natural fibre, and wool has been engineered by evolution to sit outdoors on an animal in the rain. These plant fibres have not. They spent their lives moving water around inside a stem or a leaf, and they will do it again the moment you give them the chance.
Jute is the weak one, and it is under everything
Cotton gets stronger when it is wet. Jute does the opposite, and loses a substantial share of its tensile strength while damp – which would be a manageable problem if jute were only ever used as a face fibre.
It is not. Jute is the standard secondary backing on a huge share of the natural floorcoverings sold in this country, and on plenty of wool carpets too, hidden under a latex layer where nobody thinks about it. So a sisal floor with a jute back is a strong wet-sensitive fibre bonded to a weak wet-sensitive fibre with an adhesive that also dislikes water. Three chances to fail, and the floor remembers every soaking it has ever had.
Lignin is the other half of the jute problem. It is the compound that stiffens plant cell walls, it is water-soluble in the sense that matters here, and it is brown. Wet the backing and the lignin travels.
What does hot water extraction do to a natural fibre floor?
Four things, and they arrive in order over about seventy-two hours.
First, swelling. These fibres are hygroscopic to a degree wool cannot match, and they swell across their width rather than along their length. A sisal weave that has taken on moisture goes tight and hard, the cords fatten, and the whole panel grows. You will see it as a ripple or a low dome in the middle of the room within an hour of cleaning, and the inexperienced take that as a sign the floor is merely wet.
Second, shrinkage – the same movement running backwards as it dries, except it does not come back to where it started. The weave sets in its new position, and the floor remembers that shape for good. A fitted sisal floor in a Blackheath sitting room pulled itself off the gripper along two walls after a single extraction clean and left a gap you could put three fingers in. Nothing to be done about that except relaying it, if there is enough left to relay.
Third, delamination. The latex bonding the face weave to the jute backing softens with heat and moisture and does not re-bond. The floor starts to feel loose underfoot, there is a faint crackle when you walk on it, and eventually the backing separates in sheets.
Fourth, and the one that finishes most of these floors: watermarking. Wet a patch of sisal with clean water – no detergent, nothing else – and let it dry, and you will get a brown ring at the edge of the wetted area where the migrating lignin and plant tannins collected as evaporation pulled them outward. Plain water does this. The stain you were trying to remove ends up smaller than the mark you made removing it.
Why a 30cm wet patch ruins a four-metre floor
Because there is no such thing as spot cleaning a wet mark on sisal. Any moisture boundary becomes a visible line, so the only way to wet-clean these floors without ringing them is to take the moisture out to a physical edge – a wall, a doorway threshold, a seam – so there is nowhere for a tideline to form.
On a fitted floor in an open-plan flat, that means wetting sixty square metres to deal with a coffee cup, which brings you straight back to the swelling and the shrinkage. This is the trap. The technique that avoids the ring guarantees the distortion, and the technique that avoids the distortion guarantees the ring. There is no version of hot water extraction that gets you past both, and anyone who tells you their machine is gentle enough has not seen the floor eight weeks later.
Is seagrass the tough one, then?
Half true, and the half that is true misleads people constantly.
Seagrass fibre has a hard, waxy outer surface, near enough impermeable, which is why a splash of red wine on seagrass can sit there for a minute and be lifted off with a cloth while the same splash on sisal is already permanent. Seagrass also takes dye poorly for the same reason, which is why it comes in the colours it comes in and nothing else.
What the wax does not do is protect the backing, the weft, or the adhesive. Water runs off the cord and straight down into the jute, and everything in the previous section happens exactly as before. I have seen a seagrass floor in Wanstead where the surface looked immaculate and the whole covering had gone hollow and rippled underneath after a tenant’s flatmate ran a hired machine over it.
The thing seagrass will not survive
Standing water. A leaking radiator, a plant pot with a cracked saucer, a spilled bucket – any of those sitting on seagrass overnight will mark it permanently and probably buckle it, because the wax buys you minutes rather than hours. Blot fast, then get airflow underneath if you can lift an edge.
So how should these floors be cleaned?
Dry, almost entirely. Vacuum first, and do it more often than you think – twice a week on a hallway, using a cylinder with good suction rather than a beater bar, which frays the cord ends on a chunky sisal weave and turns the surface fuzzy inside a year.
For general soiling, dry compound cleaning is the method that works. It is a moist absorbent granulate, worked into the weave with a counter-rotating brush machine, left for twenty minutes to draw soil into the carrier, then vacuumed out. Total moisture applied is a fraction of what an extraction machine puts down, and it evaporates before it reaches the backing. Host and Capture are the two systems most London contractors carry. It will not produce the transformation people expect from a carpet clean – reckon on lifting the general dullness and taking the floor back a couple of years, and nothing more.
For spots, solvent rather than water wherever the spill allows it. Dry-cleaning fluid on a white cloth, worked from the outside in, with a fan running. Grease and wax respond well. Anything water-based that has dried is usually a permanent resident.
What to do in the first sixty seconds
Blot with white paper towel, hard and repeatedly, changing sheets until they come away dry. Do not add water. Do not add a spotter from under the sink. If the spill was substantial, put a dry towel down, weight it, and leave it while you find someone who works on these floors – and the floor remembers what you did in that first minute more faithfully than anything a contractor does later.
When is replacement the honest answer?
More often than I would like to admit in writing.
If a natural fibre floor has been watermarked, the mark is in the fibre and it is not coming out. I can reduce the contrast around it, I can even the general soiling so the ring is less obvious against its surroundings, and if you stand at the door in low light you will be pleased. Stand over it in daylight and you will see the ring. Anyone quoting you £200 to remove a watermark from sisal is selling you a disappointment with a receipt attached.
The rug conversion, and why nobody mentions it
A cut panel can be edged with cotton or linen binding for somewhere around £15 a linear metre by any competent rug binder – there is one in Barnes I have used for years – and the difference that makes to the floor’s future is substantial. A rug can be taken outside and worked on from the back, which is where half the treatments for these fibres want to be applied. When it finally goes, it goes on its own, without a fitter and a skip.
Which brings me to the opinion that will irritate the flooring showrooms on the Ladbroke Grove end of things: sisal and seagrass should not be sold as fitted floorcovering in a domestic house at all. Bound as a rug on a wooden floor, they are excellent – you can lift them, treat them from both sides, and replace one at four hundred quid instead of relaying a room. Fitted, they are a beautiful surface that cannot be cleaned, sold to people who are never told that until something gets spilled on it.
That is the conversation to have before the floor goes down, rather than the week after somebody drops a glass.
The Islington runner will be replaced this autumn. The wine was never the problem.