What Colors Go With a Blue, Green or Yellow Rug in a Living Room?

A green rug in the living room goes with wood, tan leather, rose and rust, and in sage or olive it behaves almost like a neutral. A blue rug needs warm company: rust, camel, peach, cane and brass. A yellow rug in ochre or mustard sits best with rust, walnut and cream, and looks cold beside a large gray sofa.

Which color should lead depends on the room's light. Ochre warms a room with cool or gray daylight, navy settles a room you use mostly after dark, and sage calms a room already full of wood and plants.

Partners for each rug color, at a glance

Each rug color has partners that share its temperature and a few that fight it. Match the big surfaces, the sofa and the wood, to the partner column; keep the colors in the last column to small objects, or out of the room.

The pattern behind the table is temperature. Ochre is warm, so yellow Moroccan rugs want warm partners. Blue is cool, so it wants warm partners to balance it. Green sits in between, which is why it gets along with more of the room than the other two.

Yellow rug in the living room

A yellow rug, in ochre or mustard, is the rug for a living room that takes cool or gray daylight. It puts warmth low, on the floor and under the furniture, and leaves the walls free to stay pale. Its best partners are rust and walnut; its worst is a large gray sofa.

Zafran is named for saffron and is that color in the pan: a solid ochre-gold wool field with no motif and no border, pale ivory tassels at each end. It comes from Dune, our solid-field Beni Ourain rugs.

In the photograph, Zafran sits in the round inside a curved rose velvet banquette, under a marble pedestal table, with cushions in mustard, navy and rust and a paper lantern above. Every partner in the room is warm, and the plant beside the sofa does the green for you. Rust is yellow's best partner rather than gray because the two share a warm base, so the room reads at one temperature; gray beside ochre tends to look cold rather than calm.

Two yellows of different undertone side by side make each other look wrong, so keep lemon and acid yellows out of the cushions. Cream, tan leather and a little navy are the safe additions.

Abrid, from the Amazigh word for path, keeps the same ochre and lays thin pale ivory lines along its length, each slightly jagged, running end to end. The lines do quiet work in a long room: they carry the eye down it. Between two rust velvet sofas, with a pale stone table and a cane bench, Abrid brings pattern without adding a color.

Blue rug in the living room

A blue rug, in navy, teal or cobalt, works in a living room when it has warm company: rust, camel, peach, cane, brass or tan leather. On its own blue reads cool, and beside gray it reads colder still. It is the rug for the part of the house you use in the evening, because navy holds a room still once the lamps come on.

The three blues behave differently. Navy acts like a dark neutral and is the most forgiving underfoot. Teal leans green and sits well with peach and rose. Cobalt is the loudest of the three and wants the most ivory around it; it is the closest wool comes to what many people call Moroccan blue, the intense, slightly violet blue named for the painter Jacques Majorelle, who used it across his garden in Marrakech (Majorelle Blue).

Itran means stars in Amazigh, and the rug takes the word literally: a deep navy field scattered evenly with small ivory dots.

Under a brown velvet sectional and two cream bouclé ottomans, with palms and a glass-block wall behind, Itran in the round turns the seating into a place to sit after dark. The brown velvet is the warm company; the dots keep the navy from reading as a hole in the floor.

What color sofa goes with a blue rug?

A rust, camel or cream sofa is the easy answer for a blue rug, and a brown leather sofa is one of the best: leather is warm, and its brown sits naturally beside navy. If the sofa is already blue, choose a rug where blue is a different depth or a minority color, and let the rug's warm colors carry the room.

Tarz shows the same warmth in a rug. Its navy tiles, each with a small pink or camel center, sit inside stepped mauve and camel frames and alternate with ivory tiles that hold a single navy dot.

Beside a timber daybed, the camel frames pick up the wood, a rust velvet chair repeats their warmth, and the navy stays the one cool note in the room. Solid, dotted or tiled, the full range sits under blue Moroccan rugs. For a whole room in sand and washed blue, see coastal living room ideas.

Green rug in the living room

A green rug is one of the easiest colors in a living room, because green reads as a neutral beside wood, leather and plants. Sage and olive sit under almost any sofa. Forest green is a statement: it wants a lighter room and some floor showing around it.

Bejmat is named for the small terracotta floor tile of Fez and is built like a tiled floor: small raised squares of sage-gray wool set in flat ivory channels, like grout. It is a Beni Mrirt rug from Terrain, where the texture does the work a pattern would do elsewhere.

In a loft living room with tall windows onto the street, Bejmat sits under a rust velvet sofa, a rose velvet sofa and two cream bouclé chairs without competing with any of them. That is sage doing what a neutral does: it takes two strong upholstery colors at once.

Azetta means loom in Amazigh. Forest green and pale sage bars run its length like warp threads on a loom, with nested green brackets at the top, one mustard bar across the middle and a row of blush and brown blocks below it.

With a cognac leather armchair, a cream bouclé sofa and oak around it, the forest green holds the floor and the leather warms it. It is also the answer for a brown sofa on a green rug: tan and brown leather is green's most natural partner.

With a green sofa, turn the question around. Choose a rug where green is the minor color, or a warm rug in rust, ochre or peach, rather than a second large green. Sage, olive and forest green all sit under green Moroccan rugs. Telling sage from olive, and which suits which room, is in sage green vs olive green rug.

Blue and yellow, blue and green: one rug, two colors

A rug that carries two of these colors does the matching for you: its second color becomes the accent you repeat in the room. Blue and green sit next to each other on the color wheel, so together they read calm. Blue and yellow sit opposite, so together they read lively; keep one of the two in the minority. Repeating that second color twice in the room is the whole method, laid out in the three-color method for a colorful rug.

Lazward carries all three: cobalt, mustard and forest-green blossoms on an ivory and blush field, redesigned radially for the circle. The cover rug, Nila, is the blue alone, and the brown velvet sofa behind it is the warm company the blue asks for. Tarz pairs navy with camel, and Azetta pairs forest green with one mustard bar. More designs that carry several colors at once sit in Bloom, our colorful Moroccan rugs.

How to choose the color for your room

1. Start with the light. A room with cool or gray daylight takes ochre; a room you use after dark takes navy; a room full of wood and plants takes sage.
2. Then read the sofa you own. Read its color against the partner column in the table. If the sofa and the rug would be the same color family, change the depth or let the rug's other colors lead. What color rug goes with a gray, brown or green couch works through the common cases.
3. Decide solid or patterned. A solid field puts the color on the floor as a surface. A pattern mixes it with ivory, so the same color reads lighter and softer.
4. Check the color on the shape you want. Each shape is redesigned, so its colors land in new proportions: Tarz reads Navy & Camel as a rug, Teal & Mustard as a round rug and Coral & Teal as a runner.
5. Size it. Most living rooms take a 245x305 cm; the method is in living room rug size.

Placing the accent colors around the room once the rug is down is its own method, set out in decorating around a colorful rug.

Will a colored wool rug fade?

A deep navy or a saturated ochre is worth the commitment when it stays that color. Our natural dyes are fixed so the color does not transfer or shift with use, and every color is checked against the final design in the workshop wash, so the rug arrives in the color you chose from the photograph.

Strong direct sun is hard on any textile over the years, so a rug under a bright window is worth rotating twice a year, as the care guide suggests; it also evens out wear from the paths across the room.