Choosing a rug for the bedroom can be quite a task if you’ve never done it before.
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.
Considering Key Requirements
There are many things you should clarify to make picking a rug easier. The first one is this: what exactly do you want the rug to do for you or your bedroom?
Do you want the rug to anchor your furniture layout, add warmth underfoot, or make the space feel cosier and quieter? Maybe you want all three? Clarifying your goal will make choosing the right size, texture, and material so much easier.
Different rugs and carpets feature different benefits. Some are better in terms of performance in high traffic areas, others may be better at being eco friendly.
You have to think about all of the boxes you want the rug to tick. For example, let’s say you want something that balances indulgence and practicality while warming up your bedroom. In that case, you might want to consider shaggy rugs.
They have fibres that resist crushing and maintain their structure over time. They also add textural warmth to contemporary spaces. However, due to that texture, they also tend to work best in bedrooms with clean lines and minimal furniture to prevent visual overload.
Here are some key factors to consider:
- Size matters – For appropriate sizing for queen or king-size beds, look for rugs large enough to extend 18–24 inches around the bed.
- Maintenance – For simpler care and cleaning, opt for loop pile carpets or hand-tufted rugs, which are easier to vacuum and keep clean.
- Match your style – For aesthetic concerns, choose tones and textures that reflect your mood board or vision for the space.
- Consider where you’ll put it – Don’t try to put delicate rugs in high-traffic areas. Opt for ones designed to tolerate heavy foot traffic instead.
- Eco-friendliness – If you want your rug to be eco-friendly, look for transparent manufacturing processes and clear documentation of environmental claims.
Knowing things like this can help you figure out things like the types of carpets and rugs you should be looking at. Whether you end up with olefin carpets or polyester carpets, what matters is that they fit your needs.
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 that you want to replicate or mimic with the rug? Do you want to pair synthetic material items like nylon carpets with certain furnishings, for example?
Is there a particular visual effect you want to achieve, like a lengthening of the room through stripes?
Here are some tips to style your bedroom with rugs or carpets:
- Echo the tones and textures of your key furniture pieces. For example, pair cream wool carpets or rugs with light oak.
- Pair sleek and minimal furniture with textured or patterned rugs. It’s a great way to add interest to what might otherwise be too sterile.
- Add contrast to the room through the rug. If you have a lot of hard lines or surfaces, for example, use a high-pile weave or geometric prints to break up the lines.
- Match materials and colours. A jute rug and natural fibre carpets can go well with a rattan cabinet for earthiness. Plush carpeting or wool rugs can go with fabric wardrobes for softness.
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!
