A Room-By-Room Guide to Rug Sizes

Rugs are pieces that can define a room’s look, changing the way a viewer perceives it in several ways. They have the power to set your interior décor’s tone, bringing it all together into a consistent style. They can also act in support roles to bolster the impact of other pieces, melding into the background or adding a contrasting accent. A rug has a certain color, pattern, material, construction, and shape that lends it a certain appearance. These are the traits that might first draw you to a rug.

In addition to these characteristics, though, you should carefully consider its size. This last quality may not always stand out to you right away, especially when you are shopping online. However, it’s vital to how a rug will interact with a room and the furniture and decorations within. All other factors kept constant, a rug can have a quite different effect on a room depending on how small or large it is relative to everything else. This is a room-by-room guide to rug sizes where we’ll offer up recommendations on the ideal rug dimensions in different areas of the home.

Broad Sizing

Regardless of the room, there is a broad approach for sizing that you can apply just about anywhere. You usually want to go for rugs that cover a large proportion of the space in a room so that they can unify all your other items together. This will allow a rug to become a foundation there and will ensure that it does not look awkward among the other pieces. A rug that is too small will seem out of place and get swallowed up by the furniture. Naturally, this also means that the rug’s dimensions should fit those of the room to match its shape.

There may be instances where you want to break up a room into clear parts as well. For example, you might have a studio apartment where the kitchen, living room, and bedroom all share the same open area. Here, you could choose rugs sizes based on where you want to draw imaginary borders between those different sections, rather than choosing one extra-large rug to fill up the entire space. Still, when you are buying a rug for a specific portion of the apartment, you want it to cover most of the floor that you are committing to that one section.

Living Room

Now, we’ll get into the separate areas of a typical house. Let’s start with the living room—the primary place many people associate with rugs. There are three core formats that most designers follow. The first is one in which the rug encompasses the entirety of the furniture. In other words, all the legs of every furniture piece stand on the rug. With this configuration, you can ground pieces together when they are not placed against the walls at all. It is also useful in open floor plans where you want to make a well-defined living room area divided from the rest of the space, since the rug edges act as visible boundaries.

The second sizing layout is to have the rug touch each furniture piece, but not completely encompass them all. The common way you will see this done is to have a central coffee table fully on the rug with the seating pieces and smaller tables that are arranged around it having only their two front legs on top of the rug. You might pick this layout when your sofa or chairs are set up against the wall. This will keep the entire rug visible and still leave some edge space open in the living room.

Finally, you can opt for a rug that is not touched by the surrounding seating at all and only lays under a central table. Sizing the rug this small may make it seem like you are going counter to the idea of using large rugs, but there is a reason you might choose this option. In a living room that is small and cramped, a rug that covers too much floor may accentuate the lack of space. By using a rug that sits in the middle of your seating, you manipulate the proportions to make the room feel more voluminous.

Dining Room

Next, we look to the other place of gathering and guest-entertaining in the house—the dining room. In contrast to the living room, there is only one overarching model you should follow in most cases. This is because the shifting of chairs around the dining table limits how you go about sizing the rug for practical reasons. As you don’t want to have people tripping due to the uneven ground or getting their chairs caught as they scoot backward and forward, the rug needs to be large enough to completely enclose the chairs even when they are pulled out from the table.

Once you have this in mind, you should also look at how the dining table is shaped. A rectangular table should have a rectangular rug underneath, while a square or circular table should have a square or circular rug. This will make it easier for you to fit the rug to the table in the proper way and prevent a visual clash of shapes.

Bedroom

The bedroom once again has three methods you may choose from which mirror those of the living room with some variation. One arrangement is to have a large rug that takes up most of the floor in the bedroom and holds all four legs of the bed and any accompanying nightstands. If you have a standing dresser or wardrobe, this does not need to touch the rug at all and can stand off to the side against a wall. Overall, the rug should be rectangular and placed in a “perpendicular” way with relation to the bed. In other words, the longer sides of the rug should be parallel with the shorter head and foot of the bed. This setup will expand the room in the eyes of a viewer and will allow the rug to include the nightstands

Another option you have is to leave the head of the bed and the nightstands off of the rug. All other aspects are kept the same as the first arrangement in order to retain the enlarging effects while allowing you to go a bit smaller with the rug’s width. This gives off a staggered, neat appearance, as the rug has empty space on the side and foot of the bed, while its one side serves to separate the nightstands and top portion of the bed from the rest of the room.

The last approach you can adopt in your bedroom is to obtain two identical area rug runners and place them on either side of the bed. Here, you want to get runners that have a length that allows them to fit within the length of the bedsides without going past the foot. They should also be short enough so that they do not touch the nightstands while having more width than the nightstands. This arrangement can build up the look of the bedroom by using the rugs as accompaniments to the other pieces. They can either introduce subtle patterns and texture variations or create an interesting contrast.

Now that you know how to select rugs with our room-by-room guide to rug sizes, you need a place where you can find high-quality rugs that fit your required dimensions. Visit Boutique Rugs online and go through our selection. We have rugs of different types and sizes, from bohemian-style rugs to animal-style rugs.