Before you spend money on a new area rug for your home, here’s some helpful advice from a textile designer and rug collector, as highlighted in this New York Times article by Tim McKeough.
It wasn’t until a friend invited him to design a collection of rugs that the textile designer Zak Profera found his true calling. Before that, Mr. Profera was working in music marketing.
“I thought, ‘This is what I need to do to be happy,’ ” said Mr. Profera, 32, who started his New York textiles company soon after creating those rugs for Decorative Carpets in Los Angeles. “I knew I couldn’t afford to do rugs,” he explained, “and thought fabric would be similar.”
His company, Zak&Fox, makes graphic textiles for designers like Robert Stilin and Workstead. But Mr. Profera still can’t resist a good rug, so he also collects and sells vintage Turkish and Persian carpets, and Overland, the fabric collection he introduced this month, was inspired by those designs.
It’s easy to be seduced by pattern, he admitted, but when you’re choosing a new rug there are other, equally important, things to consider:
- Will the rug be in a high-traffic area like an entrance hall? If so, think durability. “Ask yourself,” Mr. Profera said, “will this rug get trashed in a year, or will it stand the test of time?”
- Consider the scale of the room: “You don’t want the rug to look like a postage stamp,” he said. The best size is one that fills most of a room, or at least the entire sitting area.
- What if you decide to rearrange the furniture? Circular rugs and free-form shapes offer flexibility if your furniture layout changes. And layered on top of traditional shapes, they create a sophisticated, collected look.
