The bedroom is central to our experience of “home”, after all, whereas rugs often provide the visual point that ties the decor of a room together.
What does that mean? Simply that getting the bedroom rug wrong can have a pretty serious impact on your visual enjoyment of your home.
More than that, it can have a negative effect on your practical or tactile comfort too.
In any case, we’ll get into that below, where we’ll go over the tricks for picking a good rug for the bedroom.
Determining the Function
This is one of the first things you should clarify to make picking a rug easier. What exactly do you want the rug to do for you or your bedroom?
Do you want it to make the floor more comfortable to walk on in the mornings by making it a bit warmer to your heels when you get out of bed?
Or would you want it to muffle sounds like heavy footsteps or dropped items?
Whatever the case, consider that because it can help you figure out things like the types of carpets and rugs you should be looking at.
If you want something that can muffle sound heavily, for instance, you should probably look into very thick, plush rugs that offer a lot of cushioning for impact.
Things like bamboo rugs wouldn’t be as advisable then, as they’re largely flat and can’t absorb sound very well.
Of course, if your purpose is solely to elevate the look of your bedroom, that’s also fine. It can even make the task of finding a rug easier, as it reduces the requirements the rug should meet!
Matching Rugs to Existing Decor
You can ask a lot of questions here to help you figure out how best to work with your current decor.
Do you want something that complements the current colours? Something that offers a contrast to them?
Do you have a particular texture or material in the existing decor – say the curtains or other furniture – that you want to replicate or mimic with the rug?
Or is there a particular visual effect you want to achieve, like a lengthening of the room through stripes?
Look at colours, textures, shapes, and patterns. Believe it or not, even room construction materials can help you choose a rug.
As an example, take wooden floors. These are some of the easiest floors to find rugs for, as just about anything can match them. Moreover, they tend to go beautifully with vintage rug designs, so classic or old-style rugs are perfect choices for them.
However, if you have tiled floors, you may well have to be more careful with your rug’s design.
Tiles can come in all sorts of colours, patterns, and styles, which means they add to the ornamental points your rug should work with.
Considering Room Shape
Yes, the shape of the room is another consideration when choosing a rug.
For the most part, rooms are four-sided cubes, so most rugs come in square or rectangular shapes. Circular or elliptical shapes are also common.
But when your room is irregularly shaped, picking a rug becomes more of a challenge. If you get it wrong, the rug can actually unbalance your interior decor, which is hardly what you hope for when buying furnishings for your house.
Our advice for those with such bedrooms would be to go ahead and look for a custom area rug.
Getting a bespoke rug done can solve the problem by ensuring your room’s form matches the rug’s shape, keeping the harmony of your interior decor intact.
Note that this problem can affect those with custom or unusually shaped beds too, by the way. Again, custom rugs can most definitely help with such situations!
Estimating the Size
How big should your bedroom rug be?
Well, it actually depends on how you intend to use it. What do you want to put on it?
Do you want it to hold the entire bed?
In that case, you’ll need a rug that’s at least 45 centimetres beyond the sides of the bed – to ensure you land on it when you get out of bed and it can still be seen properly. Make sure it goes a fair bit over the bottom or end of the bed too, for visual reasons.
What if you want it to hold two nightstands as well?
Then count those in the measurement because you can’t very well put a nightstand half-on and half-off a rug. It gives it uneven footing, which makes it prone to wobbling.
Or what if you’re trying to save money and can’t afford a bed big enough to do all of that?
Well then, try getting a rug big enough to hold at least the bottom two-thirds of the bed. This can be an attractive way to use smaller rugs for the bedroom – but make sure you still overlap the bed’s sides and bottom properly.
Alternatively, you can use two runner-style rugs on either side of the bed, with the bed completely off them.
Need More Help Choosing a Rug?
If all of this still isn’t enough to help you settle on a rug, feel free to reach out to us! We’ve helped many homeowners figure out the best rugs for their bedrooms, often even designing custom ones to suit their tastes.
Whatever the case, we’ll do our utmost to help you figure out everything from size to materials. Contact us now and let us know what you want or need from your bedroom rug!
