The January sales offer people an opportunity to save a lot of cash on new furniture. Furniture is one of those things that are worth waiting till January to buy, purely because things like dining sets, sofas, armchairs, coffee tables and so on are so expensive.

If you save up your money till the January sales then you could save hundreds of pounds on redecorating an entire room. That makes sense in today’s tough economic climate. It frees you from always having to look for second-hand furniture and cast-offs from friends and family, meaning you can decorate according to your own tastes.

Broadly-speaking, you can split your furniture choices into two categories: the contemporary and the traditional.

Clearly, the variation of styles within these two categories is broad, especially given the number of furniture shops that hold sales at this time of year. For all that, you do need a starting point when it comes to finding rugs that match your new purchases.

Contemporary furniture

Contemporary furniture varies wildly in terms of its shape and colour. What you generally find is that contemporary furniture without patterning looks great with modern rugs with geometric and curvilinear designs. Conversely, modern furniture with a lot of patterning of its own looks good with a plain rug.

Of course, plain rugs can still be very colourful and there’s no reason why you can’t find textured styles to make things more interesting. Shaggy rugs and coloured sheepskin rugs work really well to reintroduce texture when a lot of your modern furniture is quite smooth and shiny.

Another possibility for quite modern spaces is offered by natural rugs. The thing about natural fibres is that they are neat and uncomplicated, which is often the point of more modern forms of design. If your budget furniture is about minimalism then natural rugs are something to look out for.

Traditional furniture

It seems fairly obvious to suggest that traditional rugs go well with traditional furniture. Wooden furniture with a natural finish always looks great alongside the time-honoured motifs and colours of traditional rugs.

However, the more ornate pieces of furniture to be found in the sales mix things up a bit. You don’t want to run the risk of clashes between furniture and textiles. Some sofas, for example, feature wonderful prints. A clash of patterns is visually unappealing so you need plain options as well.

Most plain rugs will go quite well with traditional style furniture, but sheepskin rugs offer that something extra. They perhaps have the longest history of all styles of rugs and that means they fit the traditional profile really well. They also have a luxurious richness that matches the greater substance of traditional wooden furniture.