A vintage rug in the bedroom: the size, the place, the pile
How big a rug should be for a double or a king bed, where it sits against the bedside tables, and why deep wool pile belongs in the bedroom.
The alarm has not gone off yet. The shutters are still closed, a line of grey light lies across the ceiling, and one foot comes out from under the duvet and goes down, looking for the floor. On bare boards in November that floor is cold enough to wake anyone. On old wool it is warm, deep and a little springy, and the morning starts half a minute more slowly.
That first step is the whole reason for a bedroom rug, and it settles most of the rules. The wool has to be where the feet land. Designers quoted by Ideal Home want the rug to reach 45 to 60 centimetres beyond both sides and the foot of the bed. Rebecca Ward, speaking to Livingetc, goes further and likes about 90 centimetres, so there is room to stand up on wool rather than on the edge of it.
In sizes, that comes out simply. A double bed sits well on a rug of about 180 by 270 centimetres, the long side running across the room, parallel to the headboard. A king wants something closer to 240 by 300, which Therese Germain of Ruggable told Homes & Gardens leaves about a metre of rug on either side. In a large room, a rug big enough to hold the bed, both bedside tables and a bench at the foot frames the bed like a mount frames a print, and still leaves a band of bare floor, at least 30 centimetres, between the wool and the walls.
Most bedrooms take the more forgiving layout, the one Heather Goerzen of Havenly calls the most popular: the lower two thirds of the bed on the rug, the top third and the bedside tables off it. The rug starts just in front of the tables, a few centimetres clear of their legs. The detail that matters is the one designers keep repeating. A bedside table should be fully on the rug or fully off it, never with two legs on the wool and two on the floor, rocking under the lamp. Germain adds one more: let the rug's width run out to the outer edges of the tables, so the eye reads the bed and its tables as one piece.
A small room, or a bed pushed against a wall, can do it another way. A narrow rug or a runner along each side of the bed puts the wool exactly where the feet go and leaves the rest of the floor open. The old Middle Atlas rugs are often long and slim, and a pair of them laid either side of a bed look as though they were woven for it.
Then the pile, and here the bedroom is the one room that asks for depth. Under a dining chair a thick pile snags and wobbles. Under a bare foot it is the point. Wikipedia's entry on Moroccan rugs notes that some are very thick, with a heavy pile suited to the snow of the Atlas Mountains, and that Berber households used pile, knotted and flat-woven rugs as bed coverings and sleeping mats. A Beni Ourain, cream wool with a few dark lines drawn through it in a loose lattice, was made to be lain on as well as walked on. In a bedroom it goes back to something close to that first job.
Colour follows the light. A bedroom is seen mostly at the two ends of the day, in the low blue light before the shutters open and the warm yellow of a bedside lamp, and cream wool takes both. It brightens a dim north room in the morning and goes the colour of honey under a lamp at night. A darker rug, plum or madder red, makes a small room feel held and close, more like a tent than a gallery, and suits a room kept for sleep and nothing else.
The rest of the room can be quiet. White linen, a headboard in oak or rattan or plain lime-washed plaster, a single lamp with a cloth shade. On a pale wooden floor a cream rug looks like a drift of snow that has settled and stayed; on dark boards it glows. A worn patch where the same foot has landed every morning for thirty years does not need hiding. It is the most honest part of the rug, and in a bedroom it is exactly where it should be.
Every rug in the gallery is listed with its length and width in centimetres, and the deep-pile Beni Ourain pieces are the ones to look at first for a bedroom. The bed goes on the tape before the rug does.