Tips on Matching Your Home Décor with an Area Rug

A home can feel incomplete without area rugs to ground some of its main rooms. You could have a flawless furniture and decoration design, but if you leave your hard floor bare, your home could end up feeling more like a cold museum filled with beautiful pieces rather than a personal living space. Due to their role in unifying a room, it’s clear to see that area rugs are a must-have in the majority of homes. Understanding their importance is one thing, though, while using them to achieve the desired effect is another. Place a random rug down without considering its interplay with the rest of the room, and you may transform the space from unfinished to unsightly. For this reason, you should absorb these tips on matching your home décor with an area rug into your thinking. You’ll gain the maximum benefits from your rugs this way.

Look at the Rug’s Coloration

When you view a rug online and in-person, one of the first defining characteristics that you will notice is its color. It should thus come as no surprise that you must look at a rug’s coloration when trying to figure out whether it will slot into your home naturally. Reflect on what kinds of hues are at work within the room that you want to add the rug to. What colors are repeated amongst the furniture and different decorations? How about the room itself – are the walls and permanent fixtures like ceiling lights a distinct color?

If you already have an overall palette that’s easy to identify, you can choose a rug that parallels it directly. For example, a room that is primarily made up of blues and light beiges could have a rug that includes matching shades of blue or beige in its design. An achromatic room with pieces that are black, gray, or white could effortlessly include a grayscale rug. The entire rug does not have to be one hundred percent in line with your established color scheme, but with at least some of it colors matching those of the room, you’ll be more assured that it will fit.

Consider the Rug’s Style

The next feature of a rug to consider is its style. This is comprised of the patterns on its face, its material, and the way that it was constructed. You likely want your home to emanate a certain atmosphere and choose your decorations and furniture to create it. In the same way, your rug should work to reinforce the other pieces with a look and texture that speaks to your overall sense of style. Sometimes, this is a relatively simple task because your home stays within a well-established theme. Your rooms might have their look dictated by Southwestern sensibilities, so a rug with Native American-inspired triangle and diamond patterns that are organized symmetrically would work well.

However, you may wonder what to do when your home does not fall within a strict color scheme. In this scenario, you should instead focus on the form of your other decorations and any motifs that they share. Are most of your pieces smooth and rectangular? If so, a plain rectangular rug with a uniform pile or a rug with a geometric pattern could pair effortlessly with them. Perhaps your home makes many callbacks to nature, with potted flowers and natural fabrics comprising curtains and seat covers. Knowing this, you could pick jute or sisal rugs because they are made of woven plant fibers that will continue the common thread in your décor.

Balance the Room’s Intensity with the Rug

So far, we’ve talked about going along with the established colors and style of a room when choosing a rug for it. Matching your home décor with an area rug can, and at times should, move in less of a one-to-one direction, though. You may want your rug to contrast with the room for the purpose of balancing its total intensity while you still pay attention to how well it fits there.

Let’s go into an illustration. Say your walls are painted in a warm red-orange with an abundance of pictures covering them. Your furniture and curtains are similarly red, orange, and yellow. If you put in a bright rug dominated by analogous warm tones, the room can quickly become overwhelmingly vivid. Since a good chunk of your décor is already loud, you should balance it out with a rug in neutral colors, like lighter shades of brown. It will bring everything together by somewhat turning down the individual elements’ energy.

The reverse is true as well. An extremely minimalistic home where every single piece is basic, blocky, and colorless may feel bland if you get an area rug that is also unadorned and gray. You could stay in line with your style while giving the room an interesting focal point by bringing in a rug that is still free of busy patterns but is colored in the same kind of red that would be overkill in the previous example.

Select a Fitting Rug Size

A final tip on matching your home décor with an area rug is to select a fitting rug size. The proportion of the floor that the rug covers in a room and its size relative to the furniture around it can change the impression you get when looking at the room. A rug with a length that is shorter than that of your sofa, for instance, can seem incongruous with its surroundings since it does not make neat contact with the sofa. Generally, it’s better to err on the side of getting a larger rug so that it can either completely encompass your central furniture or at least fit a table and the front legs of your seating. This will visually connect the individual pieces together since they are all touching the rug. It can also make a room feel more spacious because you aren’t breaking it up into small segments with the rug.

Furthermore, when you are looking at potential rugs for your home, you should take the measurements of the parts of your décor that will sit on top of it. In doing this, you will be sure that your final choice is appropriately sized.