Thanks for the reply :P I don't know how you call this in English so I looked it up on Wikipedia and went to the English page from there, hoping that would be the right term...

I guess what had shocked me, and I know it was the same in the whole neighbourhood (it was a school trip, each of us were hosted in a different home in the same London suburb), was that the "moquette" was both extraordinarily thick and that it was present in absolutely every room (including the bathroom and, I think, the kitchen. We found that really strange because of the possibility of "accidents" (spilling water, dropping food, etc) which made us look at that moquette as very anti-hygienic. ^^'