Choosing the Perfect Size Rug for Your Living Room

The living room is the most utilised space in the home. In fact, the way you style your living room may just be the most important interior design choice you make for your home, and a rug can make or break it. The first thing to think about when choosing a rug is the size: a perfectly chosen rug can make a room look bigger and better and transform the room feel.

At Rugs Direct, we have over 20 years of experience in rugs and pride ourselves on helping our customers get the absolute most out of their rugs.. We have over 16,000 high quality rugs from around the world to choose from at a range of prices, including luxury and designer brands.

The amount of choice out there for rugs can be daunting, especially when deciding which size you should go for. So, read through our top tips below to learn what size rug is right for your living room and enhance your home.

Top Tips

Before you get into choosing what size rug you want for your living room, here are a few golden rules to take into account:

Measure your room: Take any alcoves or angled walls into account and disregard them to get to an even quadrilateral dimension. When you have the width and length of your room measured in metres, you can get the size in square metres by multiplying the two together.

Remember to consider underlay size: Rug underlay is something novice rug-buyers often forget about. Underlay is handy for preventing rug slippage and even for improving thermal insulation. Remember that you’ll want to size your underlay so that it can’t be seen underneath your rug.

The 18-inch rule: This is a well-known standard in interior design. It stipulates that there should be around 18 inches of uncovered floor between the edge of your rug and the walls of the room to keep everything in good proportion. Reduce this to around 8 inches for smaller rooms.

Living Room Layout

So how do you decide what size rug is right for your living room?

The size of a living room rug depends not only on the size of the floor space it’s going on but how the room is styled, too. Colourfully patterned smaller rugs can make a bold aesthetic statement in the centre of a room, or area rugs can tie disparate furniture together, while a carefully-placed rug can even split an open-plan room into sections. There are so many possibilities.

Think about the purpose you want your rug to serve, and you’ll be nearer to choosing the perfect size. A really helpful way of thinking about it is, bear with us, legs. Specifically, furniture legs. Think about the way your furniture is arranged and whether you want the legs on or off the rug.

Here is a selection of living room sizes and the best rug placement for them to help you decide what’s best for your floor space:

Small living room: coffee table legs only

Styling a compact living area can be a real challenge. You might think that adding a rug to a small room that’s already got enough pieces of furniture in it will make it look too cluttered, but in fact the opposite is true.

Placing a small rug under just a coffee table, extending to only the length of your sofa, will help make your room seem more spacious. Keep a couple of inches of uncovered space between your rug and sofa to avoid an overcrowded feeling.

Mid-sized living room: some legs on, some legs off

Here, the idea is to have only the front half of your furniture, be it sofa, armchairs, or side tables, rest on the rug, with the back legs on the floor. Ideal if your sofas are placed against a wall, it helps to create an illusion of a more spacious room, especially in enclosed living rooms.

It’s important to remember with the half on, half off style that the furniture is in danger of becoming unbalanced due to the differing heights of the legs. The best way to remedy this is by adding pads to the back legs, evening things out and steadying your furniture.

Large living room: all furniture legs on the rug

This style of furniture and rug placement is the best choice for bigger rooms or open concept living rooms that have a lot more space. Here, floating furniture is placed with all legs on the rug to create a clearly defined, cohesive seating area.

You’ll need a large rug for this so that you can leave at least 20cm between the edge of the rug and the back of the furniture, or it can risk looking uneven.

Standard Rug Sizes

Below is a quick list of the standard sizes of rugs we offer and what kind of spaces they suit best, to help you along the way to choosing the perfect size rug for your living room:

Extra small – 80 x 150cm (2’7” x 4’11”)

This size of rug is a little bigger than your standard coffee table, making it ideal for more compact spaces, like a small apartment living room.

Small – 120 x 170cm (3’11” x 5’7”)

Another rug suited to smaller living spaces, this rug size is about the length of a two-seater sofa. It could work well as a coffee-table rug.

Medium – 160 x 230cm (5’3” x 7”)

This is a mid-sized rug that can work well with the front legs of furniture placed on it, giving a cohesion to your seating area.

Big – 200 x 300cm (6’7” x 9’10”)

A rug this size is a great choice for a larger living room as it works well under a floating (not placed against a wall) three-seater sofa.

Large – 240 x 340cm (7’10” x 11’2”)

This rug size is brilliant for tying together a seating area in larger living rooms.

Extra large – 280 x 360cm (9’2” x 11’2”)

A perfect size for an area rug intended for an open concept living room, this kind of rug can work with two or three floating sofas on it or under a large corner sofa.

Finding the Perfect Rug Is Easy With Rugs Direct

Rugs Direct are on-hand to help you maximise your living room’s potential with your dream rug. Our huge selection of stylish rugs and all the sizes and styles they come in means we’re sure to have the right one for you.

And if you’re looking for something bespoke, just get in touch with us directly and we’ll be happy to help.If you know what size you want for your rug but still need more inspiration for choice, just check out our living room rug ideas.