It is said that carpet can account for approximately a third of a room’s personality when taken together with your other décor considerations: furnishings and walls, which include windows.
Part of the reason is that carpet provides so many looks by combining actual and visual texture together with color and pattern plus varying degrees of soft tactile sensations offered by carpet’s textile nature.
With those facts in mind, it’s important to determine the overall look you’re trying to achieve with your carpet.
Carpets may look great by themselves, but not necessarily feel great under foot, such as the carpets made of sisal, coir or other woven grasses, and they may be really out of place in a formal setting.
In a casual or avant garde motif, the look and feel could be a feast of unexpected textures. It’s important to make friends with color early on in your carpet search, especially if creating a flow or continuity through the house is important.
Create a Mood. Flirt with carpet’s soft curves and delicate details.
Just Imagine! Mixed media. It’s the latest design trend in interior design, and that goes for flooring, too.
The look is one of combining (blending is what the pros call it) different materials, or media. The simplest form is in layering, as with an area rug over a broadloom, but the trend is in pushing the envelope in unexpected ways, like carpet with wood, ceramic, even insets, ceramic settings with glass wood or metal medallions, wood of different color and species, perhaps with an accent in stone or leather! This opens up not only a new world of surfaces, it also opens up the worlds of textures and, of course colors.
In carpet, the new colors hint at mixed media. You’ll see this year’s color palettes, but if you read not-so-closely between the lines, you’ll see how the mixing of color media, specifically the chameleon colors, creates a new medium upon which we can create the room of our dreams.
Like your look more formal or dramatic? A new trend is to add design called decos or “pieces of interest” that can bring in an elegant shiny look or even create a special design that you have seen.
Carpet can provide the background for this. A deep violet-colored carpet with medallions, glass or metal deco pieces can change the whole look and make your carpet design very personal. What about that flat, big-loop look known as Berber? Although Berber is also offered in a cut pile, the loop pile version has continued to gain popularity. It’s more of a woven or cable net look than single strands, and it has the feel of a favorite sweater. In any event the visual interest for this Berber is more in the pattern (herringbones, rectangles and squares) than in the colors. Saxony (that fat-fiber look) offers softer and warmer hues that will also add to the illusion of softness on the floor.
Layering is popular, and you might even consider a fake fur throw rug for added interest and even more softness to the mix. You are only limited by your imagination…the possibilities for carpet in your home design are endless.
