1 Begin with the rug
Instead of choosing a rug to go with a room, begin with the rug and build your room's color scheme around it. One easy way to get a subtly coordinated palette is to start with the colors that appear as accents in the rug and use them as the major colors in the room. For example, the pattern in an oriental rug might at first appear to be mainly rust and red, but if you look closely you'll see smaller areas of blue, green and yellow. Borrow a trick from professional designers and key your upholstery, draperies and wall colors to those secondary colors; the room will naturally pull together without looking monochromatic or stiffly matched.

2 Create islands
Use an area rug to pull pieces of furniture together-make a cozy conversation group by positioning a love seat and a pair of chairs on an area rug, for instance, or put a colorful rug under a dining table at one end of the family room to help set it off from the room's other functions. As a rule of thumb, a rug under a dining table should be large enough to fit chairs even when they are pushed away from the table-a 9'x12' rug should fit most six-or eight-place dining tables. To define a conversation group, a rug should be approximately as long as the longest seating piece.

3 Kick off your shoes
Before you buy, try "test driving" a rug with your shoes off-soft, rich and tactile textures are very much in vogue these days. Comfortable textured rugs make practical as well as decorating sense: In a growing number

of homes, hosts are asking guests to remove their shoes before coming in to avoid tracking in street dirt and other allergens. Among the most popular textured rugs are cushy chenilles, tufted pile and nubbly boucle-all offering a particularly nice contrast to today's popular leather upholstery and sleek-lined wood furniture.

4 Play with contrasts
Dress down a formal room with a natural textured rug such as sisal or seagrass, or take the hard edges off a sleekly contemporary room with a richly inviting pile rug. More tricks to try: Layer a floral patterned rug over a checkerboard tile floor; use a rustic braided rug in a high-tech home office; pair a softly antiqued oriental-style rug with chrome-and-leather modern furniture.

5 Break out of the box
Area rugs do not always have to be squared up with the walls-try rotating a rug's corners to soften a too-square space, or overlap tow rugs at an angle to create an eclectic style. Also, consider using differently shaped rugs in unexpected locations for a fresh look: a round rug in a foyer an oval in the dining room or a runner at the foot of the bed. An area rug can help to cut a large living room, foyer or other potentially intimidating space down to size by visually breaking up an expanse of floor. In place of a bare floor or wall-to-wall carpet, choose a rug (or have one custom-sized) to fit the room with space between the wall and the rug no less than a foot and half and no more than three feet.