Living Room Rugs
Living and dining room rugs
In a living room the rug is what holds the furniture together — without one, a sofa and two chairs read as three separate objects standing on a floor. It also does two things nobody thinks about until they are missing: it absorbs the echo in a room with hard floors and hard walls, and it makes the floor warm enough to sit on.
Most of the decisions here are about size.
Three ways to place a living room rug
- All legs on the rug. The most generous arrangement: every piece of seating stands entirely on the carpet, with roughly 20 to 30 cm of rug still visible beyond the furniture. Needs 250 × 350 cm or larger in most rooms.
- Front legs on the rug. The practical standard, and the one we recommend most often. Front legs of sofa and chairs on the carpet, back legs on the floor. The furniture is still visually tied together and you need considerably less rug — 200 × 300 cm or 250 × 300 cm covers most rooms.
- Floating in front of the sofa. Only works if the rug is at least as wide as the sofa and reaches the coffee table comfortably. Below that it looks like a mat rather than a decision.
Whichever you choose, leave 20 to 30 cm of bare floor between the rug and the skirting board. A carpet that runs wall to wall makes the room look smaller, not larger.
Sizing a dining room rug
Here the rule is simple and non-negotiable: the rug has to extend 60 to 70 cm beyond every edge of the table, so chairs stay on the carpet when they are pulled back. If the back legs drop off the edge every time someone sits down, the rug is too small, and the edge will be damaged within a year.
- Table for 4 to 6 — 250 × 300 cm (8 × 10 ft) as the minimum
- Table for 6 to 8 — 250 × 350 cm or 300 × 400 cm
- Table for 10 or more — large room sizes and above
A 200 × 300 cm rug is a living room size, not a dining room size, however tempting the price.
Choosing the material for the room
- Wool — the right answer for almost every living and dining room. Resilient, naturally soil-resistant, and it recovers from furniture dents.
- Wool with silk highlights — lustre where you want it, wool where the wear happens. A good compromise for a sitting room.
- Full silk or viscose — beautiful and not suited to a dining table or a busy family room. The pile flattens in walking lines and marks easily.
- Busy pattern versus plain — a dense classical field hides crumbs, paw prints and daily life remarkably well. A plain or pale rug shows everything. In a dining room, pattern is the practical choice.
An honest note before you order
A carpet unrolled in an empty room looks considerably larger than the same carpet once a sofa and a coffee table are standing on it. Before ordering, mark the dimensions on your floor with masking tape and leave it there for a day. It takes five minutes and it settles the question better than any diagram.
On a hard floor, use an anti-slip underlay cut slightly smaller than the rug: it stops the carpet travelling, adds a little cushioning, and takes the abrasion that would otherwise wear the foundation.
If the size you need does not exist in the design you want, it can be woven for you — see made-to-measure rugs.
At a glance
- Living room, front legs on: 200 × 300 cm or 250 × 300 cm
- Living room, all legs on: from 250 × 350 cm
- Dining room: from 250 × 300 cm, with 60 to 70 cm clearance beyond the table on every side
- Construction: hand-knotted throughout, never machine-made
- Underfloor heating: suitable
- Label STEP Fair Trade: fair wages, no child labour, monitored working conditions
- Documentation: written assessment of origin, material and knot count with every rug
Care
Vacuum in the direction of the pile, keeping the rotating brush bar off the fringes. Turn the rug end for end once a year — in a living room the strip in front of the sofa takes almost all the traffic, and in a dining room it is the chair side. Blot spills rather than rubbing. Furniture dents lift out with a damp cloth and a little patience; felt pads under heavy legs prevent most of them. Washing, repair and restoration we do ourselves. Customers in Germany can use our washing, repair and restoration service, with collection and return in the Würzburg region; elsewhere we are glad to help you find a specialist nearby.
Related collections
Rugs by room · 8 × 10 ft rugs · 6 × 9 and 7 × 10 ft rugs · Large room-size rugs · Persian rugs · Contemporary designer rugs
Djoharian Collection — since 1967. Five decades of family expertise in Oriental textile art, with roots in the Grand Carpet Bazaar of Tehran. Label STEP Fair Trade: fair wages • no child labour • monitored working conditions.
