Should Your Rug Match Your Sofa?

No, and matching them exactly is one of the reliable ways to make a room look flat.

Why matching fails

A rug the same colour as the sofa removes the boundary between them. The sofa stops reading as an object sitting in a space and becomes part of a single mass. The rug's job is partly to define the seating area — matching it defeats that.

What to do instead

• Contrast tone. A pale sofa wants a rug with some depth under it; a dark sofa lifts on a lighter one.
• Pick up a secondary colour from the room rather than the dominant one.
• Match temperature, not hue. A warm-toned sofa and a warm-toned rug will sit together whatever the colours are.

The one case for matching

A very small room, where contrast fragments the space and a tonal scheme makes it read larger. Even then, shift the tone a step rather than matching exactly.

A useful test

Photograph the room and look at it in black and white. If the rug and the sofa are the same shade of grey, there is not enough tonal separation, whatever the colours are doing.