Decided To Redecorate? Start With Rugs.

It’s only natural to feel slightly overwhelmed when you start a home redecoration project. After all, from carpet to tile, hardwoods to laminates, your choices are nearly limitless.  But it doesn’t have to make you crazy.  Interior Designer Susan Young of Chattanooga, Tennessee, offers a first step that can simplify  every decision that follows.

Her advice? Start with an area rug just inside your front door.  Considering the importance of first impressions, you may know to give extra thought to your foyer.  What you may not know is that the decisions you make there can simplify everything else. Here’s how.

Start by selecting a rug that has rich colors, a pattern, or an intricate design.  You’ll realize two benefits.  First, the soil, sand, mud, and rain that people inevitably track in are concealed, and second, and most significant for the task at hand, your rug helps you make all-important color decisions.  You probably already have an idea of the main color you’ll use in your home.  Find a rug that’s predominantly that color.  Because most rug designs consist of that least three main colors, the rug you choose, the one you’re drawn to, will provide two accent colors. With one purchase, you now have three colors you can mix and match to create striking, stylish continuity form room to room.

On a recent decorating project, Susan Young started with a base of natural, earthy brown.  Being a designer, she knew beforehand that her two accent colors would be loden and slate blue.  But for non-designers among us, who may not have that foresight, it’s nice to know that the rug she chose- Provencal from Shaw’s Kathy Ireland Collection- could have made the decision for her.  Its three colors- brown, loden, and slate blue- became the basis for all the choices that followed.  Says Susan, “Repetition of patterns, colors, and designs creates flow in adjoining rooms.”

For the sitting room, she painted the walls a bright celadon green, which brought a brilliant splash of color to the home.  Rich in tone, the color imparted a soothing, welcoming warm effect.  The base color remained equally important in the sitting room, with the natural brown continuing from the foyer fug to the carpet and as accents in the drapes and sofa fabric.

“Our customers have had pleasing results with the kind of technique Susan Young describes,” says Jason Jabara of Jabara’s Carpet Outlet. “When you use this system of determining design direction, you shouldn’t worry if colors in paints, fabrics, and  floor coverings are not exact matches.  If they’re from the same family, you’ll create rooms with depth of color, visual interest, and design flow.”

“Repeat, repeat, repeat” is one of Susan’s primary decorating tips.  “Repeating patterns, and colors, and designs over and over again helps tie many various elements together, “ she says.

So, to create distinctive rooms that flow together beautifully, find a rug you love, pick up its three main colors for your design theme, the repeat, repeat, repeat.