How To Decorate With Patterned Rugs

Rugs are great for introducing some texture to your home, but you can also treat them as potential canvases for establishing or reinforcing interior design motifs. You may feel a little intimidated by the prospect of including a clearly patterned rug in your home for this purpose, though, as doing so is a departure from the safe simplicity many people lean on. To bring interest to your home without fault, adopt the following approaches for how to decorate with patterned rugs.

Pare Back Other Details

To make stepping out of your comfort zone with your rug more palatable when you typically lean more toward modesty with your décor, you can pare back other details surrounding your rug. This can be an effective way to keep the visual volume in your home from becoming too ostentatious. To illustrate, you could set a rug with bold stripes against furniture pieces that possess minimalistic characteristics so that the rug can shine without clashing with them. You may also rein in a rug that has a collection of busy lines and shapes by making sure that its colors are soft. Black, white, grays, and light tints of blue and brown can tone down the rug’s energy effectively.

Follow Their Color Palettes

While we are on the subject of color, an alternative tactic for how to decorate with patterned rugs is to follow the color palette that a rug has in the rest of the room. You might, for instance, want to have a Southwestern-style rug in your home. If you aren’t sure about how to successfully incorporate it, find décor items that use the same oranges, browns, beiges, reds, and teals that you see in the rug’s pattern. Consider switching out throw pillow covers, drapes, paintings, or even entire chairs so that they all adhere to the rug’s color palette in some way. Taking cues from the proportions of the various hues can also help you. The rug may have larger beige areas and only small hints of the bright teal. To follow suit, feature beige more heavily in your room and save teal for small vases and other ornaments.

Tie in Similar Shapes

The shape of your rug’s patterns can also give you hints for how you should fill up your space. When viewing a room, you may feel that something is off if the rug features twisted and fluid forms while the rest of your adornments are rigid with stark geometry. Though every single piece does not need to match exactly, tying in similar shapes around the room to the rug’s pattern can augment the sense of unity there. Take that same rug with convoluted lines and place it amongst furniture that has similarly twisting designs. You’ll find that it no longer looks so out of place. Rugs with prominent triangles or flowers will likewise appear natural next to conical lampshades and potted blossoming plants, respectively.