The sofa is in. The floor is hard and the room rings a bit, so you go looking for a rug, and you order a 160 by 230 because that is the size that comes up first and it sounds big.
It arrives. You unroll it, slide it under the coffee table, stand back, and the room looks worse than it did with nothing on the floor at all. The rug is sitting in the middle like a doormat with ambitions and the sofa is marooned a foot away from it.
Nothing has gone wrong with your taste. You bought the wrong size, along with most of the country.
Rugs are sized to the furniture, not the room
This is the whole article, so it is worth saying plainly. A rug is not a smaller version of the floor. It is the thing that draws a line round the seating and tells you where the sitting-down part of the room is, which matters in a new build, where the lounge often runs straight into a dining end with nothing between them but a change of mind.
So you do not measure the room. You measure the group of furniture that is going to sit on it.
The working rule, and the one most retailers will tell you if you ask: the front legs of every seat go on the rug. Sofa, armchairs, the lot. Not near it. On it. That single move pulls the whole arrangement into one piece instead of three things parked on a floor.
The measurement
Three numbers, five minutes, a tape.
Measure the width of your sofa. Most three seaters land a little over two metres.
Add 20cm at each end as a minimum, so the rug runs past both arms rather than stopping underneath them.
For the depth, go from 25cm under the front edge of the sofa, across the coffee table gap, to 25cm under whatever sits opposite. If nothing sits opposite, stop at the far edge of the coffee table and add a hand's width.
Work that through with an ordinary three seater and you get to something close to 250 by 180. The sizes actually sold in the UK are 80 by 150, 120 by 170, 160 by 230, 200 by 300, 240 by 340 and 280 by 360, so the honest answer for most new build living rooms is 200 by 300. A corner group wants 240 by 340. The 160 by 230 that everybody buys is a bedside and hallway size that has got above itself.
Two checks before you order. Leave a consistent border of bare floor between the rug and the skirting, and keep it even on the sides you can see, because an edge that runs out of parallel with the wall is the thing your eye catches from the doorway. And open the door. A thick pile on a floor that already has LVT over it can foul a door that swings in, and you find this out after the rug is paid for.
What it is made of matters more in a new build
Wool wears better than anything else at the price, takes a knock from a dropped glass, and does not flatten into a shiny path where everyone walks. Viscose looks like silk under a shop light and marks with a drop of water, which makes it a poor choice for the room with the doors to the garden and the dog that uses them.
If the floor underneath is LVT or laminate, the rug will creep. An anti-slip underlay stops it and takes the hollow sound out of the floor at the same time.
Underfloor heating is the one that catches people, because a rug is insulation and insulation is the opposite of what the floor is trying to do. Warmup's guidance is to avoid rubber backing entirely, keep thick rugs off the area above the floor sensor, and go thin rather than deep, since a heavy pile holds the heat under it. Worth checking your own system's literature before you commit to a thick wool rug in a room that has heating in the floor.
In an open plan room, one rug per zone
If the kitchen, the table and the sofa all live in one space, the rug is doing a job the architect left to you. It marks where the living end starts. Keep it square to the sofa rather than to the walls, keep it clear of the island overhang and the bar stools, and do not try to cover the whole floor with one enormous rectangle. Two properly sized rugs in a long room read better than one that is wrong in both halves.
Why it is worth getting right
A room with hard flooring and fresh plasterboard has nothing in it to absorb sound, which is why everything echoes for the first few months. A big rug is the single biggest fix available, ahead of curtains and well ahead of cushions. It is also the warmest thing you can put on a screed floor in October.
We size rugs for a living in show homes across Bristol, Bath, Portishead and Thornbury, and the mistake is the same in a four bedroom detached as it is in a one bed flat. Everyone buys one size down. If you are standing in the room with a tape and two options in a basket, take the bigger one.
If the sofa has not been bought yet, one good wall, three things that want it is the one to read first, because where the seating lands decides the rug, not the other way round.
Send us the room before you order
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Stand in the doorway, take one photo from there, and send it to us. Tell us the width of the sofa, what the floor is, and whether there is heating in it.
We will tell you the size to buy, whether the room wants wool or something flatter, and where the edge should sit. Nine times out of ten the answer is one size up from the one in your basket.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.