Gray has become a staple in more recent interior design color palettes. It's a neutral color with a wide range of shades and can easily be paired with almost any other color. It's a softer neutral that is easy on the eyes, unlike black that can cause a harsh contrast to other colors, white that can easily become dirty, or browns that limit your color palette range.
This is why choosing a gray rug for your living room is one way to incorporate this popular color into your design while still having countless choices on shades and patterns. If you're looking for ways to add a gray rug to your living room, keep reading! We've put together some beautiful ideas to inspire you.
1.Pastel Pairings
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Gray is easily paired with a wide range of colors, but when combined with a soft pink, it creates a delicate and sophisticated living room. In this room, opting for a lighter gray rug provides a soft contrast against the floor's darker shade and highlights the lighter colors in the printed pillows. These gray variations allow even a muted pink to pop.
2.Creating Depth
In this living room, a gray rug ties together the floor's light wood and couch legs with the mixed whites and grays throughout the furniture. This allows you to mix materials, such as white wood and gray metal, without giving the room a hodge-podge look of random furnishings. You can also use a larger rug that will allow you to place the couch on top of it, creating a separation between the wood flooring and the couch's wooden legs. This would be great for when your couch legs and wood flooring are different shades.
3.Bold Color Palette
Gray is the perfect neutral accent color for an already bold color palette. The rich orange, emerald, and turquoise of this living room could easily go from bold and luxurious to overwhelming if the chosen rug added more colors to the already diverse, but complimenting, palette. Using a deep gray rug provides the right amount of a neutral color without losing the richness of the design.
This rug is the perfect dark gray to emphasize a bold palette:
4.Greens and Grays
When choosing to decorate with grays, adding a lush accent color can elevate the whole room. Greens are reminiscent of nature and can make the plant life in your living room stand out. In this room, the gray rug's texture paired with the velvet green accents add a luxurious element you can reach out and touch.
5. Little Details
When using detailed throw pillows on your couch, it's a great idea to pull a minor color from the pattern for your rug. This creates a cohesive look that ties your couch and rug together. In this picture, the rug's dark gray pays homage to the darker gray shades in the flamingo throw pillow.
6. Create Texture
It's easy to fall in love with clean lines and flat surfaces, especially in modern interior design. However, adding a bit of texture can break up the hard and stoic feeling a room can have. By adding a gray shag rug, this room maintains its modern look with an added depth.
7. Imitating Materials
It can be hard to determine what rug would be the best fit in a living room full of gorgeous colors, rich textures, and mixed materials. This gray rug features several shades of gray woven together and appears to be shining in the sunlight, imitating the metal vase's shine. Focusing on small details to highlight can keep the room from being too overwhelming.
8. Light and Bright
Everything can get washed out in the sun in a living room with tons of natural light and lighter furniture. This rug carries just enough darker tones in its pattern to contrast the light furniture and floors without appearing as a big dark spot in the middle of the room.
This two-tone rug has the perfect mix of dark and light grays:
9. Adjoining Rooms
When you have an open floor plan, there's more than the living room you have to consider when decorating. In a smaller area like this, where there is little dividing up space, consider choosing a rug that highlights the other room areas. Although the couch and walls in this room are much darker than the kitchen, the lighter shade of gray helps bring the darkness of the living room to the lightness of the kitchen.
10. Rule of Three
In interior design, the Rule of Three is a guideline that says odd number pairings are more appealing to the eye. In this room, this applies to the three different textures used. The rough and worn look of the walls, the velvet of the couch and chair, and the thick, soft texture of the gray rug make this all gray room visually interesting with even lack of color.
11. Staying Neutral
Gray matches most colors, so there's nothing wrong with pairing it with other neutral shades. This gray rug is the perfect complementing color for light wood tables and other shades of beige.
12. Taking Up Space
Large rugs are ideal for larger, open floor plans. This room has a simple color palette of gray and light wood. A smaller rug would have made this room appear bare, while this large gray rug fills the room with warmth.
13. Industrial
When going for the ever-popular Industrial style, choosing a dark distressed rug can provide an old and worn look, perfect for exposed and weathered brick walls.
14. Taking Shape
In a living room composed of squares and sharp corners, adding a bit of a softer shape can round out the room. This bullseye patterned rug mimics the circular coffee tables, breaking up the rest of the room's sharpness.
15. Simple Textiles
There's nothing wrong with sticking to simple textiles and materials when going for a basic yet modern look in your living room. This rug adds texture to the room but allows the green wall to be the focal point.
16. Highs and Lows
When mixing different shades of gray furniture, it can be hard to decide if you want to emphasize the darker shade or lighter shade. This rug is the perfect combination of both highlights and lowlights.
17. The Lighter Side
White rugs, especially in the living room, are hard to maintain. If you want a lighter color that won't show every speck of dirt, opt for a light shade of gray that will have all the brightness of having a white rug, with way less hassle.
This light gray rug will help you achieve this bright look without the hassle of whites:
18. Perfect Patterns
This textured and patterned rug is perfect in a room where the couch is the simplest and most modest room element. When the couch is the largest piece of furniture but lacks some statement design, adding textures and colors surrounding the couch can make the room feel more complex.
19. Vintage Glamour
This distressed Oriental-style rug mixes just the right amount of vintage and posh. The deep tones of the flower mural wallpaper add to the modern take on old glamour.
This distressed Oriental rug can help you achieve this look:
20. The Perfect Balance
When you're choosing bold colored walls and furniture, like this deep teal and mustard yellow, it doesn't hurt to have a soft neutral to balance it out. This gray rug allows the room's focal point to be the walls and/or furniture while still connecting with the cooler tones in the paintings.
21. Metallics
A gray shag rug and lots of natural light create a beautiful shine that looks almost metallic. This is a wonderful addition to rooms following a neutral only color palette of whites, blacks, and grays since it adds an eye-catching element to the living room.
This shag rug is sure to shine in your living room:
In Closing
When looking for the perfect gray area rug for your living room, the possibilities are endless. You can look for more than just color when considering the different textures and patterns that will highlight any element in your living room.
For more living room decor, check out these posts:
17 Inspiring Living Rooms With Gray Floors