How to live with a rug
A few simple rules for choosing the right size and letting a handmade rug do its quiet work in a room.
People ask us all the time how to "decorate" with a Moroccan rug. Our honest answer, after living with several ourselves, is: do not overthink it. A good handwoven rug is not an accessory you arrange the room around. It is the thing the room quietly settles onto. Once you get the size right and let the piece breathe, most of the work is done.
Get the size right
Size is the one place we would push you to be brave. Bigger almost always wins. In a living room, aim for all the front legs of your sofa and chairs to sit on the rug, ideally with a hand's width of rug beyond the outer legs. It pulls the furniture into one visual group and makes the whole space feel larger, not smaller. A rug that floats in the middle of the room, marooned and undersized, is the single most common mistake we see. Under a dining table, the rule is simpler: the rug should extend at least sixty centimetres past the edge of the table on every side, so that chairs pushed back are still fully on it. Our size guide walks through the exact numbers for common room shapes.
Let the rug lead
A handwoven rug with real character likes calm company. Let it be the pattern in the room. Keep the sofa upholstery quiet, keep the walls even quieter, and the rug will flatter everything around it. Two loud patterns in one space fight each other and both lose. This is why our own living room, three floors up in a Manhattan walk up, is mostly plain wood, plain linen, and one piece of wool doing the whole colour and rhythm job by itself.
Use it, do not protect it
These rugs are made to be used. Wool is naturally resilient and, thanks to its lanolin, more forgiving with spills than most people realise. Put your rug where life actually happens: under bare feet in front of the sofa, beside the bed so it is the first thing you touch in the morning, in the strip of morning sun a cat will find within a week. Take your shoes off, rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees every few months so the wear evens out, and forget about it the rest of the year.
When something inevitably lands on it, the treatment is not complicated. Cool water, a clean cloth, blot from the outside in, never scrub. We have written the full playbook, including what to do about wine and pets, on our care page. Then head to the collection when you are ready to find your piece.