Traditional Area Rugs

How a Traditional Rug Can Highlight Your Room Decor

A traditional rug can highlight your room’s decor by reinforcing the room’s color palette, overarching style, and tone. When you design with the whole room in mind, you’ll naturally choose a rug that pairs well with the other wall art, pillows, poufs, and miscellaneous decor. Purposefully tying your decor and rug together is what will take your room to the next level design-wise and make it feel like a true reflection of you.

Decorating With a Traditional Rug

You may be thinking that traditional area rugs only work in traditional homes, but that’s far from the truth. Interior design styles often blend with one another, so if you want to bring a traditional flair into another style like modern, farmhouse, coastal, or some other style, the right traditional rug can perfectly blend your styles together. 

Choosing Which Traditional Rug is Right for You

As you shop for your perfect traditional rug, it’s important to think through a few important topics. 

Position: First, look at your room’s layout and determine where you want to place your rug. Each room is unique, but these general ideas will guide you in the right direction. 

Living Room: Large traditional area rugs are often used to ground your main seating area. In those situations, you can center the rug in front of the seats, under their front legs, or further beneath them. 

Dining Room: When you add a rug to your dining room, be sure to center it beneath your table and have about two feet of rug on each side/end of the table. That will give you plenty of room to move the chairs and accent your whole dining area. 

Bedroom: If your bed is a main focal point in the room, then you can further highlight that by laying a rug all the way under the bed or closer to two-thirds of the way beneath it. However, if your bed is off to one side, then you can still use a large area rug in the middle of the room or right along the side of the bed. 

Kitchen: 2x3 and 3x5 traditional rugs are great additions in front of a sink or stove, since the rug will provide comfort to those stations. Another way to add padding to those areas is to use a traditional runner rug instead, especially if you’re working in a narrow kitchen or kitchen with an island. 

Bathroom: Traditional runner rugs also work well in bathrooms in front of a double vanity. However, if you want to make a smaller statement, try 2x3/3x5 rugs in front of a tub, shower, or sink. 

Outdoors: You can dress up your deck, patio, or porch with an outdoor traditional area rug. For layout ideas, refer back to similar indoor spaces. 

Size/Shape: Once the layout is set, you can finalize the size and shape of your rug. Both of these aspects are dependent on how your rug will layer with the furniture and the size of the room itself. However, to get you started, consider popular shapes like round, rectangular, runner, and square rugs. Once that’s set, you can check out different sizes like 5x8, 8x10, and 9x12 rugs. 

Pattern: Traditional rugs come in a variety of different designs, and each has its own tone and roots. Persian and oriental rugs are the two most common types of traditional rugs, but you can find others that are floral or geometric too. When you look at the rug’s designs and patterns, this is also a good time to consider materials like wool and cotton and whether the rug is handmade, since these factors also impact the rug’s appearance. 

Color: Traditional area rugs are often known for their rich color palettes of blacks, browns, and golds, but there are other choices like blues, greens, pinks, golds, yellows, etc. When you choose your rug’s color palette, be sure it ties into the rest of the room’s color scheme and conveys the same tone.

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