Living Room Rug Guide & Neutral Rug Roundup

This post is sponsored by Ben Soleimani.

Today, we are sharing an updated look at our living room with this Ben Soleimani 9×12 Rug. If you follow us on Instagram, we are sharing in stories a look at how our living room looked with our previous 8×10 rug and while we loved that rug, we struggled with the placement of our furniture in the space and felt a 9×12 would work so much better and we were right!

If you missed this post, we talked about incorporating more natural elements into our home to fit our aesthetic and we love how this natural rug does just that and completely changes the entire feel of this room!

How to choose the right size rug?

If you don’t remember our previous rug, you can see it here. While the 8×10 worked, we struggled with placement of the furniture and had to bring our furniture closer together within the room, to follow our rug guide, which made the furniture placement feel a bit more crowded than we liked.

For perspective, our living room and dining room are combined together within one large room we refer to as the front room. Our fireplace is centered between the two rooms and we have a glass globe pendant that centers the living room which we like to use as a guide to keep our coffee table centered under.

Our previous 8×10 rug only allowed for a couple of inches of each piece of furniture to be on the rug, and if you look at our guide below, you will see we like for at least 6″ – 12″ of the furniture to sit on the rug.

Rug Placement Tips

Tip 1 : Have the front two legs of furniture sit on your rug by at least 6″

Tip 2 : Allow at least 2-3′ of walking space around your coffee table

Tip 3 : Have at least 1 side table sit on your rug

Bonus Tip : Keep your rug at least 2′ from your walls

This isn’t the greatest photo- our ceilings are only 8′ tall, so naturally this perspective is skewed, but we wanted to include it for you to get an overhead view of our room now.

Notice how our side table is able to sit completely on our rug now? Before it didn’t even come close to touching the rug, which made it feel disconnected from the rest of the furniture.

The hand-woven jute is so beautiful paired with the natural elements in this space and feels surprising soft underfoot.

Notice our mantel decor changed a little bit from this post 😉

Selecting a rug is such an important decision in design- it really is the foundation of a room and sets the tone for how the entire space will come together. Below, we have sourced some of our favorite neutral rugs from Ben Soleimani– ours being number 1.