Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Decorate With Vintage Bedroom Vanities







A vintage bedroom vanity can add glamour to your daily routine.


Vintage bedroom vanities create an oasis for leisurely primping. Finding one you love can be the inspiration to redecorate your whole bedroom. Depending on your budget and the time you want to spend, you could go a period route, tracking down other vintage elements, or simply refresh the room with a few accessories and a coat of paint. However you decide to decorate with your vintage vanity, you might start to feel like an old time movie star sitting on that cute little stool facing a mirror that is gently curved to frame your face.


Instructions


1. Make your vintage bedroom vanity the inspiration for redecorating the bedroom. Research your piece to see what other furniture the bedroom of its time might have contained. Track down a matching dresser and bed online or in antique stores for a historically accurate feel. Or mix and match eclectically with pieces from other eras. Place a white 1920s vanity whose paint is now charmingly chipped near a rusted wrought iron bed frame from the 1940s. Balance out the romance with a clean-lined modern desk of blond wood and matching shelving. Consider combining new pieces with your vintage vanity. Replace a broken mirror with a new, unframed circular mirror hanging on the wall. Find a new bed with an invisible frame to allow an ostentatious 1970s piece to shine without competition.


2. Paint walls and floors to bring out the best in your vintage vanity. Remove wallpaper that camouflages the vanity and replace it with paint in a contrasting color. Try ochre or hibiscus blue paints to set off cream-colored vanities. Pull color combination ideas from magazines. Test colors that appeal to you naturally by painting several swaths on the wall near your vanity and evaluating their effect during different times of day, in natural and artificial lighting. Give tired wood floors a coat of bright white paint to reflect light and set off darker furniture. Be bold with color choices if you are going with an exotic theme. Make red walls and floors unabashed partners with an elaborately gilded varnished green vanity. Go all the way with design choices once you have made them and remember, you can always repaint.








3. Accessorize your bedroom to maximize the impact of the vintage vanity. Search for prints and linens from the era. Think 1967 bedroom set, psychedelic sheets and a Barbarella poster. Match a 1940s vanity with a round, beaded green velvet pillow for the chair, crisp cream sheets and satin blankets in several shades of green for the bed and gauzy silver-white curtains and you've got old Hollywood glamor. An angular 1980s table lamp adds intrigue to an eclectically mixed vintage bedroom. Shop for functional accessories such as clocks, jewelry boxes and even slippers and robes in antique markets to further personalize your design.

Tags: vintage vanity, your vintage, your vintage vanity, bedroom vanity, vanity with, vintage bedroom