Living Room Magic Carpet

Biscuit test-driving new magic carpet

Last week, David and I purchased this sample rug for our living room and have decided that we love it. It wasn't available in our required size, so we've ordered a larger one from a different store (Kensington Carpet One), which should arrive within 10 days. I'm a little nervous since our design consultant, Danah, advised us that different dye lots may have slightly different colours. I love the muted colours of the sample rug and hope the new one isn't too much darker (newer).

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If you can't tell, the rug is a creamy sage colour in the middle, with an ivory border. The main accent colour is a darker sage green and there are slate blue highlights, and pink highlights.

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This rug has answered all my prayers! And it's finally given me direction for the living-dining room. The rooms are open-plan and have a lot of different colours already and I wanted to re-use as many of the existing features as possible.

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For example, I have a sage green sofa and chair in the living room, so the rug really needed to work with them! We also have custom floral draperies in both rooms (panels and valance) left by the previous owner. These are green chintz, with large white, blue, and pink flowers, and gold trim! I really hope to re-use these for a while to save money (although they are not to my taste, they are traditional and suit the room just fine). We also have dark antique furniture.

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The main problem, though, was the dining room rug (below). It's a dark rose with ivory and taupe, and has small blue and green accents. Although the sofa creates a divider between the two rooms, I still wanted to rugs to be similar (e.g. both traditional, similar palate).

So, I really had a lot of things to coordinate with this magical rug!

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And did I mention our chartreuse (yellow-green) walls? They are very pretty and look gorgeous in the evening light. The chartreuse (painted by the previous owner) has grown on me, but I decided there was simply too much colour and I would sacrifice these walls if the new rug palate demanded it.

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And to top it off, I really wanted as much blue accent as possible in both rooms since my tableware is mostly white and blue! What a conundrum. I almost called a decorator about 40 times in the past few months.

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But the new rug makes everything obvious. It coordinates beautifully with the sofa and chair (sage) and works reasonably well with the rose rug in the dining room (much better than the various contemporary rugs I brought home to try). The new rug even looks good with the draperies. But the chartreuse walls don't work and need to be neutralized!

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I'm happy to change the wall colour, but it does open a whole can of worms. You see, the living-dining room walls extend into the front hall, which entend into two stairwells, which extend into upstairs and downstairs hallways! For coherence, I'd like to carry a single colour throughout (currently there are 3 different greens!).

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The downstairs has a lot of browns, with a brown brick fireplace in the family room (still undecorated except for an inexpensive cream rug and old oatmeal-coloured furniture) and brown flooring in the hall.

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So I've decided to paint the whole thing in a warm off-white or very pale brown. I haven't decided on my colour yet, but I like Benjamin Moore's Creamy White (light beige) and White Down (ivory). I'm sure this decision will take weeks, and another few months to get all the painting done!

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I will post pictures when it all starts coming together!