Floral Rugs, Brought Up to Date

Floral rugs carry a reputation from a particular era of English decorating that they have largely earned their way out of.

What changed

Scale and colour. The chintz association comes from small, dense, high-contrast floral repeats in pink and green. Contemporary botanical design tends to be either much larger in scale — a few big stems across an open field — or much more tonal, with the flowers barely a shade away from the ground.

Two approaches that work

• Tonal: flowers in one or two shades of the ground colour. Reads as texture from standing height, reveals itself up close.
• Graphic: large, simplified, almost drawn rather than illustrated. Sits comfortably with modern furniture.

The traditional route

Genuinely traditional floral rugs — the all-over Persian designs with trailing vines and palmettes — work best when they are the only pattern in the room, and when the furniture is plain and modern. The contrast is what makes it look deliberate rather than inherited.

Rooms

Bedrooms above all, where softness is welcome. Also very good in a hallway: a dense botanical repeat is one of the best patterns there is for hiding traffic.