You spend roughly a third of your life sleeping, so your bedroom should be an area in which you'll love relaxing at night and waking up every morning. You can create a new style for your bedroom with techniques such as changing your color palette, choosing your accessories judiciously and defining your space.
Mission-Style Bedroom
Mission style is all about blending simple wood furniture and white walls with brightly colored tile and Spanish and Moroccan influences. To bring this style into your bedroom, choose plain, medium- or dark-wood furniture; Mission-style furniture features straight lines and slats. Add bright Moroccan-style tile accents around the room, such as along the border of a fireplace or instead of crown molding along a wall. Moroccan tile features intricate, colorful, geometric floral patterns. If you don't have a nice hardwood floor, consider putting in a stone floor instead of putting carpet down and then adding a Southwestern-style throw rug. For lighting, put up wrought-iron sconces; your accent lamps can be simple, clean-looking Arts and Crafts-style stained glass. If you must have color on your walls, stick to very pale pastel colors; white is more true to Mission style. For wall decor, simple stained-glass panels are beautiful; find salvaged windows from old houses, add picture wire and hang them up.
Loft-Style Bedroom
In an open-plan loft space, it can be disconcerting to stick your bed in one corner and call that the "bedroom." If you don't want to remodel and add bedroom walls, you can create a little nook for your bed by hanging a floor-to-ceiling curtain with curved hospital-style ceiling tracks. You can find these at medical-supply stores. If you'd like light to come through, choose a pale-colored, translucent curtain so that it allows light in but still gives you privacy.
You don't have to live in a loft to have a sleeping nook. Screens are a good way to section off your "bed space" from the rest of your bedroom, which you can then use as an office or sitting room. Japanese shoji screens, made from paper and wood, let light through while providing a visual barrier. Carved wooden screens have tiny holes as part of their carved patterns, so they allow some light through, but will darken a space a little more. When the sun hits them just right, they'll cast a beautiful dappled shadow in the room. Modern plastic or Plexiglas screens can often alter the color of light while maintaining privacy. Vintage Danish Modern-style Plexiglas screens can be found in apple green, for example, making your sleeping nook into a verdant wonderland. You can also use a freestanding bookshelf as a room divider. You can then block out or let in light by putting objects strategically on the shelves.
Rustic-Style Bedroom
Turn your bedroom into a mini hunting lodge with warm, earthy colors such as dark reds, browns and forest greens. Add a handmade quilt in these colors to your bed; you can even find quilts that feature hand-sewn hunting and woodland scenes. Wood-paneled walls make the room feel like a rustic cabin. For a country feel, choose furniture made from logs rather than finished wood. These pieces will look like you made them yourself from the trees outside your "cabin" window. If you're up for that challenge, HGTV has a tutorial on making your own rustic bed frame from raw white birch logs (see Resources below). Otherwise, you can buy furniture made from unfinished cedar, aspen, hickory or pine logs. Depending on the wood and the intricacy of the design, a log bed could get quite expensive. Buy pieces made of reclaimed lumber if you're environmentally conscious and want to save resources.
One way to add some rusticity to your bedroom is by showcasing woodland wildlife. If you're not a hunter, or you haven't bagged anything large enough to hang on the wall, you can buy wildlife mounts such as stuffed and mounted moose, elk, deer and bison heads.
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