By Interior Designer Toni Berry
Alameda Times-Star
THE CHALLENGE:
You've just finished redecorating your family room. You've purchased beautiful new furniture; it blends well with the older pieces you've chosen to keep in the room for sentimental reasons. The new wall color is warm and inviting and adds so much to the space. Your new draperies are simply wonderful, in the fabric you've always wanted to have. You finally got it together to accessorize the room correctly: lamps, trays, vases, family pictures and great art on the walls.
But something is missing in this otherwise well decorated and well appointed room. What is it? It's the final little design element that's needed in a room like the one I've described above.
The solution
The area rug is the design solution that pulls the entire room together in terms of color and weight. It does the trick every time. Using common sense as our guide, here are some tips for choosing this final design element.
- When picking an area rug for a room with a lot of patterns and textures in it, choose a solid rug in a color that contrasts with the wood furniture.
- Leave about 18 to 30 inches of floor around the area rug.
- To define a conversation or dining area, use an area rug to draw the eye in to the space and anchor it.
- If you are putting new wall-to-wall carpeting in your home, have the same carpet cut and bound to make area rugs in the rooms with hard flooring. You can also have borders placed in contrasting colors of the same carpet around the rugs. This gives your home a very customized look with little expense.
- It is perfectly OK to place an area rug over your wall-to-wall carpet. They make pads for just this purpose.
- Custom area rugs are available to fit the color and the shape of any rooms. I had a lime green area rug made for a client with a living room in the same color. The floor under the area rug was hardwood in a dark ebony color. The room just came alive when the area rug was placed down. It actually made the wood floor look more attractive than it was.
- Area rugs with a lot of pattern and color work well in rooms with simpler decor. In these settings the area rug is like art underfoot.
- Always use a runner-type area rug in the entryway and hallway. These add to the ambiance of the space. In the entryway it can serve as the welcoming committee into the home. In a country French style home I put a red-bordered, flowered area rug with a sunny yellow latticework center. It was 10-feet long and 5-feet wide. This one addition, in welcoming warm colors, just makes you smile when the door opens.
