Category: Interior Design

Often, it’s far more difficult to design the interiors of small bedrooms than larger ones.  While the challenge with larger bedrooms is getting the right furniture to fill them, the common fear with small ones is potentially rendering them unbearably claustrophobic with too much furniture.  So, with this in mind, how can you efficiently utilize your small bedroom in a stylishly effective way?  Here are nine suggestions:

1. Properly Decorate Your Room:  Don’t make your bedroom too simplistic and dull.  Using smaller sizes, try to incorporate most of the decorative items, like pictures and rugs, you would normally include in a larger room.  This will help distract from the room’s small size and make it feel more comfortable.
2. Use Mirrors:  Make your bedroom seem larger by covering closet doors with mirrors.  When your room is open, clean and uncluttered, this will make it appear much more spacious.
3. Follow the Lead of Hotels:  Several hotels have exceedingly small rooms, yet few people complain because they are expertly designed.  Copy the creative placement used in hotel rooms, efficiently incorporating nightstands and shelfs into small spaces, make the bed exquisitely comfortable and cause it to be the focal point of the room.
4. Utilize the Wall Behind the Bed:  Build shelving and chests of drawers on the wall behind the bed.  Build these beside and up and over the bed’s headboard.  This will free the other walls from clutter and make the room seem bigger.
5. Make One Wall Different from the Others:  Paint or paper one wall differently from the others to produce the visual illusion of depth.  This works particularly well with the wall behind your bed.  Give your back wall darker vibrant colors, while leaving the other walls white.  This will help draw attention away from its small box-like shape.
6. Incorporate Multifunctional Furniture:  Reduce the number of items in a room by making each one serve more than on function.  A bookcase, for example, can also double as both a headboard and a table.
7. Keep Closet Doors Flat, Plain and Reflective:  Don’t add raised handles to closet doors or paint your closets with dull flat paint.  This will prevent them from interfering with your movement in close spaces and glossy paint will help them reflect light around your room.
8. Have Items Custom-Designed to Fit Your Particular Needs:  Use all available space, including that which isn’t traditionally used.  If necessary, have a carpenter or builder design items that do this.  They can design such things as an integrated headboard-desk or a hideaway guest bed that’s stored underneath your bed.
9. Accommodate Two People, Instead of One:  Use narrower beds, with smaller non-conventional items that mimic tables, and use space-saving wall lights or clip-on lights.  In this way, you can fit two beds and all the supporting furnishings into a small room.

Other things you could try, include using bright color schemes on furnishings in white rooms and sticking to simple, space-saving bed frames.…

Interior designer Sasha Bikoff, based in New York, reminds us that good style is imaginative and doesn’t always fit a mold.  This mindset informs all of her creative endeavors, as well as her tips for bringing new life to your older furnishings.  Bikoff, in fact, has made a name for herself renovating mid-twentieth century French and Italian furniture in novel ways.  Her method has been to incorporate sumptuous left-over materials from Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana and various other high-end fashion brands into these antiques.  In search of her particular expertise, Architectural Digest found the designer at her newly-opened Tribeca antiques showroom.  Bikoff, during our discussion, detailed three relatively easy ways you can rejuvenate tired old furniture.

The easiest way to do this is to simply mix and match pieces from different periods, in creative, unexpected ways.  Like Dorothy Draper, the woman who founded the United States’ first interior design company in 1923 and created the extravagant Hollywood Regency style, Bikoff believes that classical furniture can be accentuated by the presence of more modern furnishings and the mixing of radically different styles.  In her words, “The magic is in the mingling…It’s like a conversation between some unique personalities.”  In mixing items, like some of Draper’s Hollywood Regency end tables with a loveseat from the 1700s, you could really make your room burst with new life.

Area rugs often occupy much of a room and contribute greatly to its overall brightness, color and style.  Bikoff suggests you should recolor rugs in dazzling hues to reinvigorate older furniture and rooms.  She particularly likes oriental rugs, which  can be overdyed in vibrant sky-blue, olive-green, yellow-orange or a myriad of other lively colors.  Tie-dyeing methods may also be used to create similar results.  You can match your color-enhanced rugs to individual pieces of furniture and draw attention to them.

A final way you can bring new life to old furniture is by refurbishing it with nonconventional materials and styles.  Bikoff asserts that you should add personality to your dated furniture and says reupholstering it is a good method of doing this.  Use unconventional materials and styles that reflect your unique personality and/or ones that complement your furniture’s design.  Noting how such interior design should be a personal thing, Bikoff said, “If purple is your favorite color, you should have a purple piece in your house.”

Bikoff, heavily influenced by Dorothy Draper, emphasizes an anti-minimalist style that incorporates bold colors and the partnering of items from distinctly different periods and styles.  Her suggestions for bringing new life to old furnishings range from simple eclectic pairings of furniture to methods requiring some professional assistance.  Considering all of this, the main takeaway from her advice is to be imaginative and do the unexpected.  There is no set, one way we have to order things.  Old, classic styles can mingle in a room with new, modern styles and the interaction will likely be stylistically pleasing.…