I Tried the New Custom Rug Company Ernesta to Cozy Up a Barren Room
As a typically rug-averse woman with a strange space to zhuzh up, the DTC company from the cofounders of Peloton helped change my tune.
A few months back, during a remodel of our sunporch, we learned that the walls of the room below it were in extreme disrepair. The bottom of the walls were entirely rotting out, were home to two ginormous abandoned wasp nests and would need to be entirely rebuilt so the whole side of the house didn’t fall down. Chic! After laughing to ourselves—renovations aren’t really renovations until something you hilariously couldn’t have anticipated crops up—we realized this would actually force us to use a room that was, by default, a mud-slash-trash room. But now that it had to be entirely reframed, we decided that we might as well insulate the walls and make it usable.
One thing would remain though—the concrete floor. The room has two walls of windows, which brings in great natural light, and would make a perfect additional bedroom/office. What wouldn’t add to that cozy feel was the gray concrete floor. I’m usually not a huge rug person, but in this house, with its inherited wall-to-wall carpeting in one room, and laminate wood flooring in the rest, I’ve had to get creative and embrace the texture, color, and literal warmth they can add to a space. But for our former trash room turned bedroom, we would need something that mimicked the feel of wall to wall without the actual commitment.
Therein lay the problem: the room was a little bit larger than 8’ x 14’. Anyone who has bought a rug before knows that they come in frustrating standard sizes, ones that can seem random to the average consumer. The closest thing I was able to find was 8’ x 10’—too small—or 9’ x 12’—too big. I searched some of my favorite vintage sellers on Etsy but those somewhat random sizes also didn’t help much. I realized this was going to take a lot of searching to find something that might work—and, given the large space, it would be pretty expensive.
Then I came across Ernesta—or rather, our senior home guides editor Megan brought them to my attention. Founded in 2022 by former Peloton cofounders, the company has raised a significant amount of funding from investors to offer custom-sized rugs direct to consumer online. While they’ve been in beta since that time ironing out the kinks, they fully launched in early September. So we reached out to the team to see if we could do a product test, and thus my dream of a solution for my ugly floors began to seem like a reality.
Trying It Out
Ernesta currently has 170 styles to choose from, largely on the neutrals side—though the publicist I spoke to clarified that as they ramp up, there will be more color and pattern to choose from. (Indeed, there are more on their website now than when I ordered this summer.) While their fabrics are from all over, the rugs are cut and fulfilled out of Cartersville, Georgia, the "U.S. hub of the rug manufacturing industry," according to the company (and in case you didn’t know).
Here’s how it works: you pick up to five rug samples, and Ernesta sends them to you. They come in a beautiful box; mine came with a Stanley tape measure and painter’s tape, as well as instructions (also found on the website) for measuring your space, though the company notes they’re not including those in packages anymore. (While sending you your own materials might have seemed almost overkill, the instinct makes sense: it adds to the feeling of "white-glove service" and further reduces customer error that could create issues on their end. This also seems to be the go-to in the DTC space these days, anyway: anyone who’s bought a Windmill air conditioner has experienced this via the high-quality scissors that come in their packaging, all the better for cutting the insulation that goes around your unit.) Ernesta also includes return packaging so you can send the samples back to them for reuse.
We ordered the following samples: Flannery in Gray, Bartleby in Navy, Sugar, Suwelo, and Bourne in Graphite. Because I decided I wanted something slightly plush, we went with softer fabrics, but the company offers a range of materials, from wool to other natural fibers like jute. That said, this is a space that is usually not very high traffic, but has a door that leads outdoors, so I wanted to make sure whatever we chose was comfortable but could also keep up with people coming in and out, sometimes in outdoor shoes. We threw our samples out on the floor for a few days and spent some time walking on and looking at them. They all felt great, but I found myself really gravitating to the textured, thick feeling and look of the Suwelo (a "chunky loop and cut wool rug" described by the company as "Hand-loomed in India, this 70 percent wool/30 percent polysilk blend is extra plush with a super soft hand. Ernesta’s chunkiest rug, it adds instant comfort to a space.")—and not as concerned about the cream color holding up as I had been when I ordered the other darker samples.
Sizing was fairly simple—since I was treating this as essentially a wall-to-wall carpet replacement, and there was no furniture in the room yet, I didn’t have to worry much about working around what I had. The only thing we were sure to do was make sure the door in the room could go over the thickness of the rug. And because the room in question has had some dampness issues in one corner in the past (pre-insulation), I wanted to make sure we had a little bit of space along the walls in case that cropped up again. (For those who want help, however, Ernesta offers free design consultations to discuss placement details.) Otherwise, I sent off my measurements—though mine were simple, you can get as detailed as down to an inch—and said that yes, I wanted the attached rug pad option. Had I paid for this rug, it would have cost about $3,500—not cheap, but certainly not out of the range of the hefty cost of large rugs, particularly one that exactly fit my needs.
Due to the popularity of my rug style, it took a couple weeks longer than we initially thought to schedule delivery (the team says rugs typically arrive within a speedy two to four weeks), but they soon reached back out to arrange a time. When they do, they’ll ask if you need furniture moved, etc.; mine was, again, fairly simple because it was just an empty room with an immediate door to the outside in it. A very polite team of two delivery guys showed up (one of whom was a former Peloton team member, naturally), unrolled it for me, positioned it, and we were all set.
Am I a Rug Gal Now?
And not a moment too soon—just a few days later, we had guests who needed to use the room, as well as an annual anniversary party for the house with a lot of foot traffic going in and out. I was nervous to see how my (white!) rug would do. I’m happy to say you can’t even tell there were 80 people walking over it, and our first houseguests had nothing but good things to say about the room. While I doubt I’ll ever be rug obsessed like some, and my tastes will likely always lean vintage, I’ve found myself happily sinking my bare feet into this new one, reveling in the luxe, cozy feel. It photographs as subtle, but up close, there’s a range of color and texture I’ve been enjoying.
See the full story on Dwell.com: I Tried the New Custom Rug Company Ernesta to Cozy Up a Barren Room
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