Get the look of vintage rugs on a budget! I’ve rounded up 14 rugs that add casual, cool interest to any room.
In This Post
Using Vintage Rugs In Our Home
We’ve had a rotating collection of authentic vintage rugs in our home as long as we’ve lived here. They’re uniquely beautiful and durable, and if well-cared-for, they can prove to be a great value since they can last for generations! We’ve even placed a few especially sturdy vintage rugs in our Michigan Airbnb, which speaks volumes to how confident we are in their durability!
Our most recent vintage rug acquisition fills the small nook off of our living room that we lovingly refer to as the Snug. It’s a petite space that holds our record collection and a built-in storage bench with tons of storage. It’s a tiny little room, but our friend Liz from Six Vintage Rugs, hand selected the rug for us, and it’s absolutely perfect.
We love how the deep reds of this small scale rug play off of the large vintage living room rug that we sourced a few years ago from our pal Tim at Dial M for Modern. While the big rug features mostly warm tones in the red and cream family, the snug rug sports juuuust enough sage-y cool tones to strike a perfect balance and really bring out the green undertones of the wall color. They’re a match made in heaven and they’re as unique as snowflakes! If you’re searching for our favorite tips for vintage rug hunting, be sure to check out this post where we break it all down!
Who says rugs are just for living spaces, though? Around the corner in the kitchen, we sourced this creamy, neutral vintage rug to ground the space under our small 3 top table. When we chose it, we got a lot of questions about how on earth we’d keep it clean; especially in a home with a then-5-year-old? As we mentioned earlier though, high-quality vintage rugs made of tightly wound natural fibers are durable and easy to spot clean, so we weren’t concerned in the least. It’s held up perfectly in the last two years!
Using Vintage Lookalike Rugs In Our Home
While true vintage rugs add unique character to space, sometimes the additional time and effort it can sometimes take so source a vintage rug just isn’t in the cards, so something off the shelf will need to fit the bill. In our Chicago playroom, where we’ve recently transformed the space into a creative studio of sorts, a vintage-inspired geometric rug grounds the space and provides some neutrality in contrast to the deep red walls.
In the Michigan Red House Kitchen, another more traditional vintage inspired rug again plays the role of neutral under the bold green marble vintage dining table. The tan and brown tones of this particular rug play beautifully with the walnut ceiling and echo the tree trunks right outside. We couldn’t have designed a more perfect rug for the space!
Which Is Right for You?
So, which is right for you? Do you hunt for and splurge on the perfect vintage rug for your home, knowing that it could be in your family for generations, or do you pull the trigger from a modern retailer for instant satisfaction? Vintage rug hunting can be a fun challenge given that sizes and scale vary significantly more than they do with modern rugs. It can also be daunting if you don’t know where to start. Modern rugs, on the other hand, are easy to shop for but don’t offer the uniqueness or variability of their vintage counterparts. Vintage-look rugs have come a long way over the last few years, and the quality can be similar to that of hand woven vintage rugs, so durable rugs at fair prices can be found in either category.
Either way, we’re firm believers in the logic that you get what you pay for with rugs, much as with other furniture. Investing in a high quality rug, whether vintage or vintage-style means spending more upfront, but the piece will likely last longer and look better over time.
Vintage Style Rug Round-Up
We’ve certainly rounded up vintage-style rugs in the past, but the options have come so far that we wanted to shake things up this time around! For this roundup we’ve shied away from the sea of printed and reproduced traditional Turkish and Persian-style rugs and gathered some rugs with vintage vibes, but modern touches. Maybe it’s the rich tones of our MCM-inspired Red House talking, but we’re loving the warmer, slightly imperfect geometric vibes of the collection below and we think that most of these rugs would look right at home in any space.
1. irregular checkerboard hand-knotted rug | 2. kilim handmade rug | 3. jasmine jute wool rug | 4. celestine coral rug | 5. santiago wool rug | 6. alderwood charcoal + pink rug | 7. mallory hand tufted rug | 8. folley hand-knotted rug | 9. loloi chris loves julia judy rug | 10. kate wool rug | 11. arvin olano arrel speckled rug | 12. cyrus black rug | 13. meagan brown rug | 14. kilim collection area rug
