If you want to achieve a modern look using rugs in your front room, but you don’t anything too bright and you aren’t keen on pastel tints, then it’s worth looking at some of the contemporary rugs out there that using shading and toning in their colour palettes to great effect.

Shading is the process of making a pure colour darker or deeper and this might give you the effect you are looking for. Shading adds richness and warmth but equally it makes the room a bit darker so you have to make sure you have enough brightness from elsewhere to cope with this.

Otherwise you could go for delicately toned colours. These are colours that have been shaded and tinted to the overall effect that they are greyed down – a very appealing way to remove the intensive brightness of pure colours without darkening the room too severely and veering towards pastels.

To give you a better idea of the sort of tones you get with this effect, take a glance at the Hamilton line from Montana rugs at the top of the page, where the green appears a pale olive colour and the red appears attractively burnt.