THE BASEMENT GAME ROOM RUG GUIDE

Basements are where the fun gets sent. It's the one place in the house where nobody minds the noise, so it's where the pool table goes, where the poker chips live, and where the couch that didn't match the living room got a second life.

It's also cold, hard, a little dim, and occasionally damp. That's not a reason to give up on it. It just means the floor has a bigger job to do down there than it does anywhere else in the house. Here's what actually works.

WHAT A BASEMENT ASKS OF A RUG

It has to handle a hard, cold floor

Under most basement game rooms is a concrete slab, and concrete stays cold because the ground stays cold. It doesn't care how nice your furnace is. A rug puts a layer between your feet and all that, and it's the single fastest way to make a basement feel less like a basement.

Concrete is also unforgiving in the literal sense. Drop a pool ball or a glass on hardwood and you might get away with it. Drop it on concrete and you won't.

It has to live with moisture

Basements are the dampest part of most houses, and even a dry one runs more humid than the floors above it. That rules out a few things. Wool holds onto moisture and can develop a smell. Jute and sisal drink it up and go stiff and brittle. A thick rug pad with a solid moisture barrier can trap dampness underneath it, which is worse than no pad at all.

What handles it is synthetic fiber. Nylon doesn't absorb much moisture, doesn't feed mildew, and dries out instead of holding on. Ours are nylon with a tight, low pile, which is also the construction that dries fastest, since there's less material to hold water in the first place.

If your basement has ever taken on water, even once, that's worth knowing before you buy anything. A rug you can pull up, hose off, and dry out is a different kind of purchase than one you'd have to throw away.

It has to do something about the light

Most basements get one or two small windows, if that. Whatever daylight makes it in is fighting a losing battle, and everything else comes from overhead fixtures and the light above the pool table.

That changes how color reads. Two things are happening at once: there's less light overall, and what light there is tends to be warm and yellow from standard bulbs. Deep colors go muddy, and a rug that looked rich in a showroom can land flat and gloomy at home.

So go a shade lighter and warmer than you think you need. Creams, rusts, golds, and warm reds hold their color under low, warm light. If you want a dark rug, and dark rugs look great in a game room, make sure the pattern carries some lighter tones through it so the whole thing doesn't read as one dark shape.

It has to quiet things down

A basement is a hard box. Concrete under you, drywall around you, and open joists or a drop ceiling overhead. Sound bounces off all of it, which is why a basement game room gets loud fast, and why everyone upstairs can hear the break.

Soft surfaces are what absorb sound, and in a basement the rug is usually the biggest soft surface in the room. It won't soundproof anything, but it takes the sharp edge off the break, the chair scrapes, and the arguing about whether that was a foul.

It has to survive being a basement

Game room floors take a beating: rolling chairs, dropped cues, chip bags, the occasional dropped drink. The bar for a basement rug isn't "pretty." It's "still looks good in five years."

That's the part we spent 50+ years learning. Commercial nylon was built for casino floors and airport concourses, where the traffic never stops and nobody's being careful. A basement game room is a light assignment by comparison.

A FEW THINGS THAT ALSO HELP

Pick a rug big enough to matter.
In a basement, a small rug floating in the middle of the floor makes the room feel more like a basement, not less. Size it to the furniture: three feet past the pool table's rails, two to three feet past the chairs at a card table. 

What Size Rug Goes Under a Pool Table?

Use more than one rug.
Most basements are long and awkwardly shaped, often with a support pole somewhere inconvenient. Rather than fighting that with one enormous rug, give each zone its own: one under the pool table, one under the seating, one under the card table. The room stops reading as a leftover space and starts reading as three good ones.

Let the rug bring the color.
Basement walls are usually builder beige or whatever the previous owner chose. Painting is a project. A rug is an afternoon, and it changes the room more than most people expect.

Watch the ceiling height.
Basement ceilings run low, and a lot of the room's visual weight is already down near the floor. That's an argument for a low-profile rug and for keeping the pattern lively rather than heavy.

QUESTIONS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY

Can I put a rug directly on concrete?
Yes, as long as the slab is dry and sealed. If you get any moisture coming up through the concrete, deal with that first. No rug fixes a wet slab.

Do I need a rug pad?
On concrete, a thin low-profile pad adds a little cushion and keeps things from shifting. Skip the thick, solid-rubber-backed kind, which can trap moisture against the slab. And if a pool table is going on top, skip the pad entirely and keep it firm and flat so the table stays level.

Is carpet or a rug better for a basement?
A rug, for our money. Wall-to-wall carpet in a basement means that if water ever gets in, you're cutting out and replacing installed carpet. A rug can be pulled up, dried out, and put back. It also lets you keep some of that floor visible, which makes the room feel bigger.

What about the support pole in the middle of everything?
Everybody's got one. Work with it instead of around it: set your zones so the pole lands between rugs rather than in the middle of one. Some people wrap it, some people hang a dartboard scoreboard on it, and some people have a house rule about it. All valid.

THE SHORT VERSION

Go synthetic, go low pile, go a little lighter than you think.

[SHOP ALL RUGS →]

Every rug is made to order in Georgia and ships free.