How to Pair Hand-Knotted Rugs with Your Furniture

You know the refrain.

Beauty is subjective.

As your senses interact with an object in your home—be it a vase, a mottled countertop of marble, or a plush hand-knotted rug—its presence reflects an emotion or essence in you, which can be positive or negative.

This emotion will vary from observer to observer, and that is what makes home decor so versatile. As long as you pair your decor elements in a reasonably artistic manner, there will be someone who finds your compositions gorgeous even if another person finds them drab.

In the world of traditional rugs, silk carpets, and flat-woven mats, there is a nuanced understanding among homeowners as they go about piecing together their home interiors object by object.

They know they have to find a balance between the objects they choose to populate their home with.

Commonly, as objects of the home, furniture and carpets often reside side by side, and it is their complex pairing issue that we will be unknotting today. In this post, we outline 7 guidelines for choosing a hand-knotted rug in relation to your furniture.

1. Pay Attention to the Furniture’s Surfaces

Furniture can be a lot of things: coffee tables, stools, pouffes, cabrioles, ottomans, love seats, sectional sofas, bookcases, dressers—you name it. Given that the variety prevents any one aesthetic standard, we can only ask you to pay attention to the surfaces of each of these furniture elements.

For example, if your camelback sofa is upholstered in a solid, off-white color then consider selecting an intricately patterned rug with bright colors, like our Croquis hand-knotted rug from the ‘Tessellations’ collection designed by Rooshad Shroff. Vibrancy pairs well with subtlety.

To take it further, you can also pair the secondary color in your rug to your sofa’s pillows and cushions; and you can also pair it to the color of a table’s legs or top. The opposite will also work: if your furniture is upholstered in an elaborate pattern, a hand-knotted rug of solid color would balance the space nicely.

Conversely, you can also have homogeneous pairs of rugs and furniture (solid with solid, pattern with pattern), in which case you might look to contrast further differences in texture and material.

2. Scaling Small-Sized Living Rooms to Intimacy

When choosing a rug for a small-sized living room, you need to consider how to retain the intimacy of the space and there is one broad way to go about this.

You can float a smaller 3’ x 5’ rug under the coffee table, just skirting the edges of your sofa. This anchors your space into a little island: a cluster of homely objects that placate the senses. The tightness of the conglomeration, with the carpet not encroaching into the rest of the smaller space, allows for walking room around your furniture on the carpetless remnant.

One such example of small-sized hand-knotted rug is Unruffled, a modern rug from our Noveau collection.

3. Scaling Rooms to Look Bigger

Oftentimes, homeowners use their hand-knotted rugs to make a space feel bigger. If you want to follow their example, you’ll want your rug to cover as much space as it can uninterrupted by furniture forms like tables, chairs, and the like. You'll need a large 8’ x 10’ rug that unifies the room—with sofas and tables bordering but not encroaching upon it.

Mocha is a modern carpet that meets the size requirements of this method and is an ideal choice if you are of the abstract expressionist tilt!

4. Anchoring Islands into a Colourful Archipelago

When you have large living spaces, such as in a double-volume living room in a bungalow, you can attempt to divide the room up into several spaces, pockets, and alcoves with your furniture and rugs. These become “islands” and the whole might look like an archipelago of islands having different colors and hues and social functions.

• For example, you can have a main seating area populated with L-shaped sofas and a coffee table, centered around a fireplace or television.
• Then, you can have a smaller, more private seating area with two chairs facing each other for one-on-one conversations, anchored by a smaller rug and perhaps an accent table (see picture).
• If your kitchen sidelines the living room, you can also have the dining table section, where one large rectangular rug underpinning it.

5. Three Bedroom Rug Arrangements

In the case of the bedroom, your rug placements depend largely upon the size of your bed, the surplus space around it, and the design of the rug.

• One popular configuration is by partially placing the hand-knotted rug under the bed. You can underlap the bed in any way you see fit—at the halfway mark or even just at one corner, as in the picture.
• Another popular configuration is to place an intricate hand-knotted rug at the foot of the bed, without any underlap. This is because you do not want to conceal the beautiful design under the bed.
• The last popular configuration is by placing two parallel runner rugs on both sides of the bed, especially if your bedroom has the surplus space. This gives each sleeper a soft tread underfoot.

6. Consider Shapes When Anchoring

Shapes can also be misleading when matching that of your area rug with the existing furniture. However, your rug's shape should be primarily determined by the grouping of your furniture.

 Having rectangular chairs doesn't directly imply that you would need a rectangular area rug. Complementing shapes rather than just matching everything may sometimes be the perfect style to adopt when matching furniture with an area rug in your home.

If your room has a conglomeration of orthogonal, straight-edged shapes, you can still consider disrupting the visual language with one of our round rugs—like The Blue Rug from our Convergence collection inspired by Maltese abstract expressionist art. Shapes, as the surfaces and their colors, do not have to match.

Click Pictures of Your Space, We Can Help 

In the sparkling megacities of India, the hand-knotted rug cottage industry spreads its weft and warp far and wide. You will be surprised by how many homeowners wish they could look around for a well-stocked rugs store in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata, which, incidentally are our main centres of trade.

If you are one such budding homeowner, always imagining new ways to beautify your living spaces, and if you understand the power of art, you should look around our website or even make a trip to our nearest carpets store.

Finding hand-knotted rugs in Mumbai or any other megacity isn’t difficult anymore. And what’s more, we can help you make an ideal pair of rugs and furniture if you show our consultants and experts a picture of your living space. Before you make a trip to our stores, be sure to snap up all the room’s angles with your smartphone. Technology has made all of our jobs so much easier!