How to Match Your Furniture to Your Flooring | Flooring HQ

How to Match Your Furniture to Your Flooring

Pairing furniture with different types of floors is easy with these ideas in mind
Read Time: 4 minutes
Dec 5, 2022

Your flooring is a huge part of your home. Not only is your floor the foundation for the rest of the room, but it can bring a lot of style and color to your space as well. However, when dealing with different kinds of flooring, it can be difficult to know what furniture goes with what flooring. Let’s break it down.

Matching Furniture With Wood Flooring

Wood flooring is one of the most popular choices for houses in America due to its durability and classy appearance. But there are many different kinds of wood floors to choose from, with variations in finish, wood type, and color. Then, if you use wooden furniture, you risk clashing different kinds of wood. So how do you make it all work?

Contrast Your Furniture With Your Flooring

A dining room with light wooden floors and dark wood dining room furniture.

One way to pair wooden furniture with wooden floors is to contrast the two. For example, if you have light wood floors, you could use a dark wood table to make a contrast. Alternatively, if you had dark wood floors, you could pick light wooden furniture. This creates visual interest in the room and helps break up the different kinds of wood.

Utilize the Undertones of Your Wood Floors

A photo displaying planks of different species of wood against a neutral hardwood floor.

In addition to considering how dark or light your wood floors are, you should take a look at the wood’s undertone. Each wood has a neutral, cool, or warm undertone. Warm undertoned woods will have a yellow or orange undertone, while cool-toned woods lean grayer. Neutral tones are in the middle. Once you find your wood floor’s undertone, you can choose wood pieces from that same family.

Use Wooden Furniture of a Similar Color

A dining room with a bulky wooden table in a similar light, cool-toned wood to the wooden floors underneath.

Instead of using contrast or different shades of wood, you can instead match your wooden furniture to your wood floors. For example, you can use a light, neutral wood dining table on top of a neutral wood floor. Not everybody likes this “all-matching” scheme, however. It does make your space look clean and sleek, but not everybody enjoys it.

Use Fabric or Leather Furniture

A living area and kitchen with a brown leather couch and gray fabric chair.

Utilizing fabric or leather furniture on top of your wood floors is always a good idea. It adds more depth and warmth to your space. Very neutral furniture in grays, whites, and blacks will pretty much go with anything. Alternatively, you can use a bold color against most wood floors effectively.

You can also match the tones of your furniture to the undertones of your wood floors to create a cohesive look. For example, if you want your room to feel very warm and cozy, you can choose warm-toned furniture to put on top of your warm-toned wooden floors.

Use Area Rugs to Break Up the Wood Floors

A living room with a green couch and wooden coffee tables on top of a white area rug.

Sometimes, you need to create a visual break between your wood floors and your furniture. Area rugs are a great way to do this. They allow you to add more color into your space, but also make it easier to put furniture with wooden elements into your space because they won’t directly contrast your wooden floors.

Other Tips for Matching Furniture to Floors

  • There are no hard and fast rules for decorating, so you can use your judgment
  • Bring a swatch of your wood sample when you go furniture shopping
  • You can add more colors and textures through decor and window treatments

Matching Furniture With Carpeting

If you have carpeted floors instead of wood floors, there are some different pointers to keep in mind. However, because carpeting doesn’t have as much grain or dimension as wood floors, it’s slightly easier to match to furniture than wood flooring.

Beware Monotone, or Use It to Your Advantage

A living room with a white carpet and light-toned neutral furniture.

If your carpeting is gray, you probably don’t want to get a couch in the same exact shade of gray. It could make your room look washed out and bleak. However, you could choose a cool-toned couch that complements the rug but does not look exactly the same, or get furniture with accents that break up the color. When you go furniture shopping, bring a sample of your carpeting with you to ensure you’re not buying furniture in the exact same color.

Choose Furnishings with Similar Tones, or Lean Into Contrast

When choosing furniture to put on top of carpeted floors, you can either stay in the same color family or decide to flip the other way and go for a contrast. The key is to make sure that you are not making things clash. For example, if you have a cool-toned rug, you can stay in that colorway and get a blue couch. Alternatively, you could contrast it with a bright red.

Use Throw Rugs

An image of a red patterned rug on top of an off-white carpet.

Who says you can’t use area rugs on top of carpeting? Using area or throw rugs is a great way to break up your room into smaller spaces or add a pattern underneath a large piece of solid furniture, such as a dining room table or living room sofa.

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