Rug Right: They can really tie a room together
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Beyond the eye-watering beauty and economy of high street rugs and antique lovelies layering on texture and colour, sizing, placement, and materials really counts.
Match your rug to where it’s going and what it’s serving up in terms of furnishings and a function area to effectively ground the room. If one thing you readers have taught me over the years – rules are made to be totally demolished. These are just guidelines. When putting your rug and major seating together – be intentional and team them up. Common mistakes include the rug being the wrong dimensions, or way too small for the space. Too big? Butting the skirting, it’s a queasy magic carpet ride.
In the living area choose a rug that’s longer than your sofa. We don’t want the sofa sides to be poised right on the edge, “floating” the suite. It just looks mean to have the soft flooring clipped off where sofa arms end or the rug rolling out from underneath the sofa or a bed like a skinny tongue. Gift it around 15cm to 25cm of breathing room beyond the sides. Around 30% of the rug should then extend to the front. In my view, this looks best when the rug fully carries additional seating and small tables before the sofa in a smaller space. Some stylists are happy to leave just the front feet and half the depth of sofas and extra chairs on the rug. With a low pile rug in a tonal scheme – it can work perfectly well. In the larger reaches of the room, leave roughly the same widths of exposed floor showing around the sides of the rug all around. The symmetry just has a rightness to it.
In a tiny house or a demanding corner, where the rug isn’t huge, nestle it under or up against the front legs of the sofa or pull it forward to leave a little floor on show without breaking the relationship. Your feet should land on either the floor or the rug. In an L-shape or any modular arrangement, keep that extra framing of 15cm to 25cm around the sides of the rug and advance it generously from the longer (chaise) ends if possible. Generally, you will get away with placing just the front feet of the sofa on the rug by around 8cm plus, even if the back is exposed to the rest of the room. In modest spaces, the bigger rug you can manage the better, as (oddly) they do make these function areas look more rangy, characterful, and zoned. Tracking from one height to another, even a shaved centimetre can count for someone with physical or eye-sight challenges. Dense lower piles set on a stabilising under-lay offer a safer transition.
Getting out of bed, we need an entirely flat, non-rucking rug or suitably sized runner that gives us enough room to step out of and away from the bed. That yielding, cushioning feel is so welcome for bare, vulnerable digits trotting off to work. 50cm to 80cm is about right for a luxuriant visual perimeter and physical turning space to put on your robe. To go all out, take the rug right to the back wall and float your bed, lockers, and ottoman on it. Alternatively, draw the rug forward of the back feet and lockers (about 15cm), letting the foot of the bed hold the rug and show more of it off. If you prefer, move the rug boundaries even further down the room, leaving 1/3 under the frame/divan/bottom legs, treating it as a more visible area rug.
If you have hard flooring under the rug, be especially aware of changes in level, as this could catch you and your slipper when you’re groggy. It’s vital your rug doesn’t move in the locomotion of leaving the bed to touch down to the floor. Install an anti-slip underlay to keep it firmly on the floor, edge to edge. As everywhere in the house, don’t dump the edges of furniture down on the edges of rugs. Whip stitching and knotted fringes will be sawn apart over time with the rocking pressure of even a small bedside cabinet. Turn the rug occasionally to prevent chronic furniture prints.
Where you run a rug under a dining table, it must encompass the full area needed to pull back a chair without pitching. If any chair is on a rug, and it moves, it should stay on the rug as it’s shuffled back. Wobbles here could lead to a dangerous incident if the chair tipped and repeated scratches will ruin wood flooring. You might get away with 65cm of room for manoeuvre, but I like my magic number of 80cm here. Obviously, we want to show off this large rug, not completely shrouding it with the table and chairs. Leave at least 60cm of passing room without changes in level behind the chair where needed. In terms of look, something that follows the shape and dimensions of the table is ideal, so for a 1.5m x 2m table, something in the area of 2.5m x 3m rug would work well.
Moving to any home office, there are two approaches. The first is to put the entire desk/storage and chair arrangement on the rug, zoning it, and allowing 80cm to pull or roll back your chair. Again, let the sides of the rug extend a little from the width of the table-top. If you have a four-legged table, you could also run a more slender silhouette of rug from the back wall out through the legs to just allow room for the chair without placing the legs on it at all (so long as you are not going wildly left or right on casters). Whatever you choose to do, a rug/carpet protector will be vital to prevent the chair and any wheels from chewing up a rug or hard flooring. Jysk do an excellent model for carpeting and rugs for just €25, 90cm x 119 cm with little nubs to keep it nicely in place as you skate around.
Halls are a superb setting for a rug or runner and in beautiful colours and patterns this season they soften and guide our way along awkward long corridors, landings and up the stairs. Leave room for door swings and don’t smother the entire floor. I prefer to keep furnishings off my hall runner and preserve at least the width of the head of my vacuum cleaner on each “shoulder”, so that I can flick on the dedicated head for the hard flooring, teasing it under the edge of the runner’s length. In high-traffic areas, indoor/outdoor rugs are extremely robust in nylon and polyester if you don’t fancy a heritage wool mix. Don’t neglect that stabilising underlay. Even slender rug pads give extra longevity to rugs and runners, and the flooring they are set over. They absorb shock, keep the materials flat, and stop any gritty material from getting underneath and scratching vulnerable hard flooring. With mud-catching rugs layered onto the floor, look for a very low pile, a grippy backing material, and a low rubber edge to step down to say plank flooring, eliminating any tripping hazard.