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I’ll never forget being in art class in high school and trying to convince my classmates that they could learn how to be artistic if they only tried! I’m firmly of the mind that creativity can be developed with practice, and that goes for home décor, too. You might feel paralyzed by insecurity, but I promise that you can do it if you just take things one step at a time. It’ll be slow at first, but the more you do it, the more you’ll trust your gut, and the faster you’ll get at making decisions as time goes on.

A little sappy? Yes, but it’s the truth! Which leads me to one of my most frequently asked reader questions: how do you color-coordinate around an area rug. The answer is…CHEAT! This is one of the absolute easiest home décor “problems” you could ever come up against because the answer is honestly staring you right in the face (I say this with love, by the way).

When it comes to choosing colors based on your rug, you don’t have to do anything more than take a long hard look at the colors already in existence in your rug. Take the rug pictured above in our living room as an example. All I did to make that particular rug work in our space was pull the main four colors right out of it, and then I used those to dictate my choices for accents around the rest of the room.

There was a soft creamy beige/gray in the pattern, so I used a paint color called “Agreeable Gray” by Sherwin Williams on the wall right behind the couch. There was also a good bit of dark teal blue in the rug, so I carried in one of our existing blue leather chairs to arrange off to the side. Dark charcoal also popped up in the rug pattern, so that meant our dark gray couch worked just fine with it, and that bright rusty red in the rug was the perfect complement to the reddish stain on our wood trim and vintage coffee table.

So, when I say “cheat,” I mean that you can let the rug do all of the color-coordinating for you. It’s more like following a simple formula rather than actually sitting down and doing a lot of pre-planning! The hardest part will be the process of digging through your home to find accents that pull in those same colors, but if you’ve chosen a rug that matched your whole house color palette, that should be a cinch, too.

If you want to get a little more scientific about things without just defaulting to using the same exact colors already in your rug, you could try going with complementary colors instead. Our dining room is a good example of this.

Instead of picking a rug that already had blues and greens in it to match our dark teal-painted accent wall and green mid-century lamps, I went with one that pulled more red in color. If you Google the color wheel, you’ll see that red is opposite green, so you can use a red rug to help give a room that has a lot of green in it a pop of coordinated dimension without using the same colors already in the room.

In other words, use a lavender or eggplant-colored rug in a room painted mustardy yellow, or a blue rug in an orange-painted space. I can’t explain why it works, but it just does.

I’m not sure that that’s the type of explanation you were hoping for, but it’s what works for me! I think we all have the tendency to overthink the things that are outside our wheelhouse, but this is one of those wonderful things that you barely even have to think about.

If you want to send me a photo of your rug (or anything in your house, for that matter!) that you’re trying to color coordinate around, I’d be happy to help. Just hop over to Instagram and send me a DM and we can talk it through. Bottom line: you can do it, and it’s going to be beautiful!

*I earn a small percentage from purchases made using the affiliate links above. Affiliate links are not sponsored. Rest assured that I never recommend products we wouldn’t use or don’t already love ourselves.

*This post was made possible by Opposite Wall. All opinions are my own.

Nearly every time I get the itch to hang a gallery wall in our home I dive into the project without any pre-planning. You’d think something as simple as the concept of hanging a bunch of art together would be…well…SIMPLE, but it’s not. I almost always have to pause, take a moment to think through my goals for the gallery wall (do I want to add more color? more pattern? less color and pattern?!), and then carefully work my way through what has become a tried and true process for hanging the art itself.

Keep scrolling for my best gallery wall sourcing and hanging tips, then don’t miss my coupon code at the end of the post in case you want to try this look in your own home using Opposite Wall art, like I did!

Our boho guest room is, hands down, my favorite room in the house. I love the bold pattern in the rug (all those earthy rust tones!!!), and the mismatched bedding feels like the perfect complement. The art, though, needed some work. It was okay, but I sort of made do with what we already had at the time that I was making over the space. After almost a year, it was time for new art, and I really wanted to get truly new art since I have been selling a lot of our old prints and paintings, and wanted something fresh to look at.

I worked with the team at Opposite Wall to source this latest art collection in our home, and I absolutely adore how it turned out. The rich, high contrast prints I ended up with were inspired by the tones in the rug and bedding, so it all works perfectly as a whole.

To get to that point, I first pulled up a photo of our guest room on my phone so that I could have it within eye-shot of the Opposite Wall website that I had up on my computer. Then, I went through the website, opening specific prints in new tabs every time I felt like one could be a good fit for the room. After that, I took screenshots of the prints, opened them up on my computer desktop, and grouped them together until it felt like the right fit for our space.

I know that might sound like a lot of work, and it does take time, but being strategic about your art selection will make it much more likely that your gallery wall will be a success right from the get-go. I’ve impulse purchased art one too many times without actually planning it out with the specific room in mind, and it almost always goes badly. Yes, trust your gut, but make sure you’re keeping the exact environment in mind, too.

I was able to order both the prints and the frames from Opposite Wall, which made the assembly process super simple. No more hunting through our existing mismatched collection of old art to find the right frame (which almost never works out, by the way)! I had my gallery wall art framed and prepped within 10 minutes, and then I got down to planning the layout.

One thing I didn’t mention in my online selection process above is that I also pull the room photo into Photoshop so I can digitally place the screenshots of the product images right onto the wall itself. That helps me decide on the right sizing and layout for my gallery wall. If you don’t want to do that, though, just play around with your chosen art (after it arrives and is assembled) right there on the floor. It’s easy to change up the design when the prints are laid flat on the floor, and once you’ve settled on your look, you can hang them quickly.

Before you hang the art, I’ve got one other quick tip: snap a photo of the layout you’ve put together on the floor using your phone. That way you can reference it when you inevitably forget how much space you wanted to put between the prints, and which one goes on top, etc. I even go so far as to use that reference phone photo to figure out exactly where each print will line up with the one beside it, too.

For example, I knew that my dark rust-colored abstract should be hung right near the negative white space toward the middle of the monstera print that I planned to hang beside it. Without my phone photo to reference, I probably would have hung it too high or too low. With the photo to reference, I could be exact.

I promise these little detail steps will go a long way in making your gallery wall a success the first time you hang it without having to put lots of extra “oops” holes in your wall.

As for hanging, I just use simple nails (the tiniest ones I can get away with to make patching easier later on), and I eyeball the height. I’m of the mind that right at eye level is perfect, and that too low is much better than hanging art too high. If you like how my collection turned out, then use my code “DREAMGREEN25” now through 9/21 to get 25% off your Opposite Wall order!

Color-Coordinating Around A Rug

A New Guest Room Gallery Wall

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