Tips to Transform Your Bedroom with Color & Style
Just because your bedroom is for sleeping, that doesn’t mean this spot should be drab and dull. Use our tips to infuse your sleeping quarters with beauty and style—and watch your home’s bedroom transform from ordinary to extraordinary.Boost Bedroom Colors
If you keep your bedroom walls and furniture neutral, it’s easy to add brighter bursts of color whenever and wherever you wish. Pick one or two colors you love and then repeat the hues in vibrant artwork, bold bedding and colorful accents throughout your bedroom for an easy-to-do, fresh new look.Try a Little Texture
Touch is a huge part of creating comfort in any part of your home—think comfy, soft pillows, fuzzy blankets and thick, lush bedding. In your bedroom, texture becomes a comfort you can feel at the end of the day. It’s easy to alter a bedroom’s texture with a change of linens—use a furry throw in winter and switch to a cotton throw in summer.Textures can suit any taste. Here are a few to consider for your bedroom style:
—Traditional: Hand-tufted rugs, woven wools, tooled silver, cut crystal, gilded frames, silk, china and polished wood.
—Country: Braided rugs, worn wood, rusted metals, chenille spreads, ironstone pottery, blown glass and ticking.
—Romantic: Velvet, furry throws, crystal prisms, embroidered fabrics, lace, painted furniture and hand-hooked rugs.
—Modern: Laminated-plywood furniture, plastic, smooth leather, stainless steel, terrazzo flooring and teak.
Swap Out Pillows
Accent pillows let you quickly alter the personality of any room in your home and shift the balance of color. They’re especially powerful used in a bedroom because the bed is a natural focal point. Pillows can update a room instantly by adding volume, pattern, texture, color and personality.In this homeowner’s bedroom, a subtle backdrop of cream and blue is brought into intense focus with a collection of lively pillows. Raspberry and sky-blue accent pillows pull the wall color and accent color together perfectly. Bold striped bolsters add variety and interest to the grouping.
Focus On Your Headboard
A dramatic headboard can add instant impact to a bedroom. You’ll find a wide variety of new headboards available at all price points, but consider customizing your existing headboard or using an unexpected salvaged piece for a unique, personalized option.The homeowners of this bedroom upcycled a large salvaged door and gave it new life as a headboard. Its generous size provides a bonus by blocking light, creating a cozy, private retreat in this home’s bedroom.
Wow with Window Treatments
To set a mood in your bedroom, use draperies and classic swags for a formal look, curtains and shades for an informal look, and simple blinds for contemporary appeal. Consider lining—room-darkening or insulating—that suits the particular bedroom’s window treatment and your home’s needs.Centralize Patterns
Try patterning a single wall or one section of a wall in your bedroom with a favorite wallpaper or stencil. It’s a sure-fire way to call attention to a seating area or to add pattern without taking the time to stencil an entire room.Original & Unique Artwork
Your home’s bedroom is an ideal spot for displaying collections of personal photographs. Dressing a wall with objects you love is one way to surround yourself with memories. How you put them together defines your style. Test out various configurations for your artwork by cutting shapes from kraft paper and taping them on the bedroom wall first before hanging your collection.For a quick-and-easy hanging solution, modify a piece of common molding to make a picture rail. Decorative golden picture hooks fitted with chain and rope display a mix of frames and add architectural interest to this homeowner’s bedroom. Use a circular link at the top of each chain to hang it over the hook.
Freshen Up with New Bed Linens
Nothing looks and feels fresher than new bedding. If you love the idea of new bedding but are short on storage space for bulky comforters and quilts, consider a duvet. You can even switch out the duvet cover every season—giving your bedroom mini makeovers throughout the year.Let In the Light
General overhead lighting is less important in your home’s bedrooms. Instead focus on bedside lamps and other sources of accent lighting to turn a bedroom into an inviting, comforting retreat. And the type of light is important, too—something as simple as replacing an old lightbulb with a warm-spectrum fluorescent might provide just the freshness your bedroom needs.Rearrange Bedroom Furnishings
To give your bedroom an easy, decorative makeover, angle the bed from a corner. If your present headboard looks too bulky for this arrangement, replace it with a salvaged iron gate or a shorter upholstered panel.Get Creative with Closet Doors
In many bedrooms, closet doors take up a significant amount of wall space. Why not replace the bulky, utilitarian sliding doors with something you’ll enjoy waking up to every day?These homeowners replaced their sliding closet doors with chic French doors. Mirrored panels hide closet clutter and give the bedroom more visual space.
Liven Up with Patterns
Pattern, like color, exerts an emotional pull that can jump-start a decorating style in any room. Whether you gravitate toward crisp stripes, bold florals or classic toile, patterns can be used to liven up your sleeping space.Add a dash of pattern to an otherwise patternless bedroom by draping a quilt or duvet across the foot of the bed, as shown here. A bold, geometric pattern creates an instant focal point in the black-and-white room.
Make Over with Mix-and-Match Furnishings
A perfectly matched bedroom—the dresser goes with the bed and the corresponding nightstand, and bedding from the same collection—can become stale if the look is too uniform. Wake up a tired bedroom with an eclectic blend of fabrics and furnishings.Add Design Details
Used in combination or alone, trim, molding and wainscoting offer nearly endless architectural design options. Depending on the style of your bedroom, the effect may be casual or formal, rustic or defined, traditional or contemporary. But in every case, millwork surface treatments can add charm and texture to a room.In what started as a cookie-cutter bedroom, classic flat-panel wainscoting adds structural appeal to a long expanse of wall. Combined with the light wall color, the effect is subtle yet satisfying.
Don’t Forget the Ceiling
Here’s a quick and easy way to create a cozy feel in your home’s bedroom: paint the ceiling the same color as your walls. Without a visual break between ceiling and walls, the room feels smaller and more intimate.Here, robin’s-egg blue creates a soothing backdrop for a serene, sophisticated retreat.
Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens. Used with permission. © Meredith Corporation. http://www.meredith.com. All rights reserved.
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