How to Choose a Rug Colour That Still Works in Two Years

Rugs are the largest piece of pattern most rooms contain, and they are the hardest thing to change your mind about. A method helps.

Work from the fixed things

List what you are not going to replace in the next five years: the floor, the sofa, the curtains, any large piece of wood furniture. Those are your constraints. The rug should sit comfortably against all of them, not against the one cushion you like.

The 60-30-10 approach

Roughly 60% of a room in a dominant tone, 30% in a secondary, 10% in an accent. If your walls and sofa are the 60 and 30, the rug is where you can put the 10 — a terracotta, an ochre, a deep blue. If your sofa is already the bold thing, the rug should be the quiet 60.

Practical colour, honestly

• Cream and ivory look wonderful and show everything. Fine if it is washable; a mistake if it is not.
• Mid-tone greys and mink hide the most traffic of any colour.
• Dark navy and charcoal hide marks but show dust, pet hair and lint.
• Multi-colour and busy pattern hides more than any solid, which is why hall runners have been patterned for centuries.

Undertone matters more than colour

A grey with a blue undertone against a grey with a green undertone reads as a mistake even though both are "grey". Take a photo of the room in daylight and look at the photo — the camera is less forgiving than your eye and will show you the clash before you have paid for it.

Test in the actual light

North-facing rooms cool every colour down; south-facing warms them. A terracotta that looks rich in a showroom can look muddy in a north-facing sitting room. Look at any sample in the room it is for, in daylight and at night.