Decorating your home with large area rugs does several things for your interior design — the rug in each space will set a particular mood or tone for the whole room and help provide shape to an otherwise undefined space. But if you have multiple rugs in your home, do they all need to match?
The immediate answer is: No! Think of the rugs in your home as fine art. Would you hang paintings around your home that depict the same image, color for color and stroke for stroke? Your guests would certainly be confused if you did! No matter how much you love one piece of art, its uniqueness is part of what makes it special to you. So, duplicating fine art around your home is much like having several of the exact same area rugs.
So, if you shouldn’t have the same design and color scheme on every rug in your home, what should you do? Much of that depends on how your house is designed and what you intend to do with the space.
The rule of thumb is this: All of the large area rugs you can see from a single spot in your home should complement each other.
Let’s say that from your living room you can see the hallway and the dining room. According to the rule above, the rugs in these three areas should complement each other. The designs could be similar, using the same motifs in different ways and in different shades. Or colors across the three rooms could coordinate using unique designs to define each of the three spaces. You should stick to one kind of style though, such as traditional or contemporary. However, other areas like the kitchen and bedrooms could utilize completely different styles and types of fine area rugs.
This rule doesn’t necessarily apply to the materials of the rugs that you use. Wool area rugs are used in high traffic areas, and you can still incorporate a silk rug as an accent. Having all handmade rugs is definitely a bonus though, instead of mixing in cheap, machine-made ones that are inherently of lower quality.
When it comes to sizes, you have much more leeway to mix and match. If you have a 7×9 area rug in the dining room, you can still have an 8×10 area rug in the living room, or they can be the same size. Matching the size to the shape of your room is more important than matching sizes between rugs.
If you need help picking the right rugs to complement the ones you already have, talk to the experts at Alyshaan in Scottsdale.
