Area rugs can make or break your room. Here, the pros show you how to pick the perfect size.
By Nikhita Mahtani Published: Nov 13, 2023 Save ArticleA soft rug underfoot adds a sense of coziness to a space, and the mix of textures really makes your house feel like a home. “The most powerful thing an area rug does is create an anchor for everything that sits on top of it,” says interior designer Christine Zippert, principal and owner of CC Zippert, a full-service interior design firm based in Los Angeles. “Especially in an open living plan, it can provide visual dividers from one part of a room to another.”
Rugs help to create a sense of cohesion and move your eye around the room, and they can even complement your existing furniture. However, there’s an art to achieving this look, and it first comes down to your rug size: After all, you don’t want to buy a rug that’s too small and can’t be seen under your giant dining table. Similarly, you don’t want to have a rug that’s so large, it hits against the wall or causes messy bumps.
And of course, each room has its own considerations based on the other furniture that makes up the layout—so it’s no wonder that things can get confusing. To help you out, we turned to the pros for help and asked them to give us their top tips when picking the best rug size for your space. Here’s what they had to say.
Bigger might not always be better: In the case of choosing an area rug for your home, many designers say that a too-small rug can get overshadowed by your furniture pieces and can make your house look cheap.
“Usually, the bigger the rug is, the more it’ll help unify the space and tie all your different furniture elements together,” explains Zippert. “If you’re floating your main furniture in the room—meaning it's all sitting centered in the room, off the wall, like a dining table or sofa and coffee table set in a living room—you really should aim for a rug big enough for all of your furniture to sit fully on top of it, with at least six inches of open rug on all sides. Anything smaller is going to look just that: too small.”
“Another big mistake I often see when people are choosing their rugs for their space is they might get the sizing right, but then the shape looks all wrong,” adds Zippert. For example, if you have a large, rectangular dining table, using a round or oval rug underneath would probably look odd.
It’s also worth noting that for furniture that's constantly in motion (for example: dining chairs that are pulled out from the table), the chairs shouldn’t move off the rug. As a general rule, you want to make sure that you leave at least 24 inches of room between the backs of the chairs and the edges of the rug, in order to avoid that problem. And of course, if your table is extendable, it’s vital to select a rug size that can accommodate it at its absolute longest.
“First and foremost, I always try to go as large as possible without covering up walkways or decorative flooring,” says Lauren Farrell, senior interior designer at Pacaso. “But you have to measure well to make sure you’re not going too small. When measuring, make sure to use a tape measure to determine the area's length and width, ensuring it both accommodates furniture and leaves an aesthetically pleasing border of exposed flooring.”
While you now know that you want to leave at least six inches of open rug on all sides (and even more with moving furniture), you should also make sure to leave some space between the area rug and your walls. Most experts say to make sure there’s at least one inch of exposed floor between the rug and the walls. “This helps anchor the arrangement,” adds Farrell. Otherwise, it'll just look like you installed wall-to-wall carpeting.
If you live in a small space and are nervous about the above considerations, consider what designer Alexis Pew, partner at Kaminski + Pew, calls the “half-on, half-off” approach. This essentially means that not all the legs or bottoms of the furniture are on the rug, in order to create a more contemporary design that works well in small spaces. However, there are some caveats to this.
“Ideally, you don’t want floating furniture (aka, furniture that’s somewhat of a distance away from the wall) to be used for this approach, because the cohesiveness from the rug can be lost,” adds Pew. “But when you’re arranging furniture so that some of it sits against the wall, it’s fine to sit only the front 30 percent of your furniture over the rug.” Similarly, note that the first two legs of your chair or table should also always be over the rug, or the furniture will look out of place.
If you have a beautiful rug that’s quite small or irregularly shaped and have absolutely no idea what to do with it, you can always layer it on a larger rug, per Zippert. “A good workaround for an oddly shaped, yet beloved rug is to use it as a top layer that may sit under the front legs of your seating, but not clear the back legs,” she says. “Then, select a flat weave larger rug or broadloom that can be cut and surged to size—this is your base layer. It creates the anchor the room needs, and adds another layer without the scheme looking out of scale.”
