Every spring somebody rings the Albufeira showroom about a white ring on a walnut sideboard. The story is nearly always the same: a glass of water, put down for a minute by a guest last summer and found the next morning. The sideboard had been fine for ten years before that. It will most likely be fine again, and we’ll come back to how.
Furniture care in this part of the world is rarely about dirt. The calls we get are mostly about sun coming through glass, or about what the damp did to a house nobody opened between October and Easter, and the answer to both lies in where the furniture stands and how the house is left, far more than in anything you can buy for the cleaning cupboard. A barely damp cloth handles nearly all the cleaning a good piece will ever need.
Sun on one side
The worst spot in most houses here is the arm of the sofa nearest a south-facing window. One summer is enough to take the colour out of it. Wood changes too, though not the way people expect: cherry goes darker in the light and walnut goes paler, so lifting a lamp off a table after three years can reveal a circle in the old colour, like a tan line. Sheers drawn through the middle of the day fix most of it.
Radiators do something similar, more slowly. A solid table pushed hard against one dries faster on that side and can open along the grain, and the split unit blowing straight down onto a sideboard in August isn’t much kinder. We usually suggest a hand’s width of space, which in a small flat is not always on offer; then it comes down to turning the louvres away.
The months nobody is home
Plenty of houses here are shut for the winter, holiday homes and rentals above all, and the damp settles where nobody looks. The back of a wardrobe against an outside wall is the classic case. A street or two from the sea, in Armação de Pêra for instance, there is salt in the air as well, and it shows up first as a dullness on metal handles.
Before locking up, pull the wardrobes a couple of centimetres off those outside walls and leave the cupboard doors ajar. A neighbour who opens the windows on a dry day every few weeks is worth more than any product you could buy; failing that, a dehumidifier on a timer. Cover the sofa with an old cotton sheet rather than plastic, which holds in exactly the damp it is supposed to keep out. (Garden furniture is a separate conversation, and we had it in the piece on garden furniture in the Algarve.)
Polish, lemons and the ring
Most of what goes wrong indoors goes wrong with good intentions. Spray polish is the usual culprit. Used every week for years, it leaves a film that holds dust and clouds the finish it was bought to protect, and when people ask us how to get the shine back, the honest answer is usually to stop. Oiled tables are the exception and like oil once or twice a year. Lacquered ones don’t, and oil on lacquer just turns tacky. If you aren’t sure which you have, ask whoever made it, or send us a photo.
Marble gets the internet’s favourite home remedies, vinegar and lemon, and both etch it within minutes. Water with a drop of neutral soap is all it needs, plus a coaster under the wine.
With fabric the rule is blot, never rub. Covers that unzip can go to the dry cleaner for years, which is one reason we keep going on about them in our guide to choosing a sofa; for sofas that can’t be unzipped, our atelier does upholstery cleaning and anti-stain treatment, and treating a new sofa before anyone spills on it is a great deal easier than afterwards.
A chair that has started to rock at one joint is ten minutes with wood glue now. Left until the next family lunch, it tends to become a broken leg. Lifting veneer is another matter and worth showing to a restorer before you try anything from the internet, as are inherited pieces in general, which we wrote about in mixing old and new furniture.
As for the walnut sideboard. A white ring means the moisture is caught in the finish and hasn’t reached the wood, and a hairdryer on low, held well back and moved slowly, lifts most of them in a few minutes. A dark ring has gone through, and that one goes to the restorer too.
Choosing pieces that can be looked after at all is the other half of this, and it is in our piece on sustainable decoration. If you would like a second opinion on something you own, bring a photograph to H&P Mobiliário e Decoração in Albufeira or Armação de Pêra, or send it over. When it is something we sold, we usually still know the workshop.
