How We Picked a Kitchen Rug: Our HomeGoods Rug Trial
Our kitchen rugs have been with us a long time — inexpensive, durable pieces from The Company Store (I think we bought them around 2008). They lived in our first house’s kitchen and the third bedroom, and while they’re neutral and long-wearing, they don’t flatter the new kitchen. In person they’re a little too small and their honey-oak tones clash with the avocado-colored walls, so finding a new rug (or rugs) has been on our kitchen to-do list for a few months.
We finally tackled the issue on a stop at HomeGoods. Sherry found several attractive 5 x 7′ flat-weave rugs for $49 each, so we brought a bunch home for what she jokingly called a “kitchen rug fashion show.” We threw them down in different spots, eyeballed how they read in the room, and snapped photos — so the placement isn’t perfect in the pictures, and some rugs are a little wrinkled or have tags showing.
My first pick was a bold black-and-white stripe. I pictured it anchoring the space, but in the room the high-contrast stripes felt visually demanding and too busy. We briefly considered using a rug only in the fireplace side of the room — to define that area as a cozy living nook — but the stripe still didn’t work.
In the room the stripe felt chaotic, so we decided a single rug on the fireplace side made more sense; rugs oriented in different directions across the room would compete with each other and read awkwardly. That pushed us away from bold, high-contrast stripes.
Next we tried a softer gray-on-white stripe, hoping a lower-contrast stripe would be subtler. While the gray picked up the backsplash color from the other side of the room, the stripe still felt too large-scale and a bit cheap-looking in person. That closed the chapter on large stripes for us.
Sherry’s favorite pick was an ikat-ish diamond rug in some of our preferred colors; she liked the darker tones because they wouldn’t fight with the dark floor. It did play nicely with the dining room curtains and helped her imagine a cohesive color scheme for that side of the room.
Ultimately the ikat pattern read too large-scale and distracting in person, and the colors felt almost circus-like up close, despite looking better in photos. That one got returned too — which was disappointing because Sherry had also found a matching runner for the adjacent laundry room.
After returning the HomeGoods haul, we started combing through our stash of unused rugs. We keep extra rugs in the playroom for future use or eventual sale, so we pulled a few candidates to see if anything would work.
The Pottery Barn rug that used to be in our office was too light — the off-white read dingy next to the white counters and cabinets. We also tried the Pottery Barn “Clara” rug from our den, but its warm honey-wheat tones clashed with our avocado walls in person.
We also tried our favorite yellow Moroccan-inspired Pottery Barn rug from the guest room. The pattern was sophisticated and not high-contrast, and we liked that it didn’t demand attention like the larger patterns had. But the yellow leaned too orange next to the greenish walls — it just didn’t harmonize.
After testing all the options, we narrowed our criteria: a light, subtle, not-too-large-scale pattern, ideally in gray to reference the backsplash and carry that tone into the fireplace side of the room. With that in mind we found another rug we think will be perfect — it’s on order now, and we’re excited to see how it looks when it arrives.
For now the yellow rug is staying in the kitchen temporarily, but we’ve both agreed it’s not permanent. The rug hunt taught us a lot about what reads well in this space: lower contrast, medium-to-small scale patterns, and colors that harmonize with the avocado walls and the gray tile backsplash. Once the new rug arrives we’ll share photos and let you know whether our instincts were right. Fingers crossed!
How about you — any rug shopping or weekend projects? We squeezed in family time and enjoyed having everyone together, which made all the rug-moving worthwhile.