Dining Room Rugs

Apart from the design and colour, there are three main considerations when choosing the correct rug for your dining room.

The size of the rug will generally be dependent on the size or shape of your dining table, as a good rule of thumb your rug should overlap the size of your dining table by 50cm - 60cm on all sides to allow for dining chairs. So if your table top measures 160cm x 80cm your rug should be 260cm x 180cm minimum, the nearest standard size to this would be 280cm x 200cm. If in doubt always opt to go slightly larger than the minimum size. A larger rug will also protect your floor from scratches, scrapes, and dents from dining chairs.

Your choice of fibre is very important depending on how you use the space, generally it is better to choose a rug with a low pile height or a manmade flat weave finish and use an anti-slip underlay for extra support. Although the table and chairs with usually keep the rug in place the underlay will stop the edges curling or rucking when chairs and pulled across the rug.

Lastly due to the nature of the placement of the rug spillage and stains are inevitable, opting for the right rug fibre is crucial to how the rug will keep its appearance, for general stains and spillage polypropylene is the easiest fibre to clean, although we suggest avoiding light colours with open ground designs as these can show soiling more than a good quality wool rug. Wool can be spot cleaned using a James cleaning kit or by a specialist cleaning company, generally the better the quality of the wool the better results when cleaning. Natural fibres such as jute and sisal will be very difficult to clean successfully. Alternative Flooring produce a great dry powder cleaning kit for natural fibre rugs. The cleaning products tend to work better if the fibre has been intec treated. This treatment is usually only available on bespoke natural fibre rugs. We do not recommend viscose, bamboo silk, banana silk or art silk rugs where spillage or stains could be an issue, these fibres are notoriously difficult to clean and even some specialist cleaners can struggle to remove a stain. Over wetting can burst the pile or leave a brownish stain where cleaning has been attempted.