When you buy a house or flat, there is usually a master bedroom, maybe a double bedroom, but then there is always that small, single room where nothing seems to fit. When interior designing, it is easy to be innovative when you have space, but small rooms are challenging. What design tips are available for those tiny rooms in the far corners of our home? Here we hope to offer you some ideas.

The Jewel Box Effect

Sloane and Sons offer seven excellent design tips for small bedrooms. One of the best ideas they propose is called the jewel-box effect. This means that you can create a sense of a boutique space in the application of wallpaper and by using a material called Lucite.

Lucite is a material often used in display cases and in jewelry boxes. However, there are lots of different furniture that can be made in the material, including a Lucite table over a radiator. The idea of using Lucite is to avoid a sense of clutter. You allow the light to filter through the room while having functional spaces for your things to stand on. Imagine a Lucite square by your bed to hold your book and glasses at night, for instance.

Simplify the Layout

Sometimes the advice is simple because the solution is straightforward. Architectural Digest offers an obvious but strangely magical design tip, which is to keep the layout simple. Sure, there is no magic trick here like using a transparent material, but there is common sense.  When you walk into a small bedroom, the architect would have envisioned the main wall, where the bed goes. They will have assumed you would want walking space either side of the bed, with room for some storage either side. When you follow these simple thought processes, you will see there is an obvious way to design the furniture in the room.

Making Everything Work Hard

Ideal Home is more nuanced in its advice about designing a small bedroom. They suggest making every choice in your bedroom serve a double function. So, you might have a headboard on your bed, but this should also double up as storage space. If you have a dressing table in your bedroom, allow it to double up as a writing desk too – keeping the clutter of one task off the surface for when you want to do the other. This means having a draw for your lotions and potions and a draw for your notepad and pen.

Use Dark Colors and Stripes

Elle Décor offers some wonderful design advice. Rather than focusing on the organization of furniture, they focus instead on the decoration of the walls and floor. The use of dark colors can add depth to a room, which will make it seem bigger. However, moderation is essential, as it can suck the light out of the space. Therefore, using stripes is also a useful way of adding this sense of depth. 

If you do use darker paints and wall colorings, you should opt for lighter bed linens and accessories so that natural light has something to bounce off.

Play Smart with Height and Size

House Beautiful offers thirty delicious design tips. However, the strongest of these ideas focus on making the most of the dimensions of the room. First, there is the idea of using height as well as width. Therefore, putting storage up high or installing sconces can make use of the vertical as well as the horizontal. The other way to make the most of the space is to shrink the size of the furniture down, so the room in comparison seems larger. So, you might want to buy a ¾ size bed rather than a standard double, for instance. Also, rather than buy a bench to go along the length of the end of your bench, buy a stool. You can then also use that stool as a means of storing your shoes if you want to double up like we have heard you should.

The Best of the Rest

There is so much you can do with a small room. You can include mirrors, you can make your wardrobe double as your mirror, you can use paneling to section of the room to make it look bigger. While there are obvious places where your furniture should go, there is still a lot of space for imagination in that small bedroom – if anything, it is more exciting because it is a challenge.

Author Bio: Sloane & Sons are the UK’s leading suppliers in Tub Chairs. Here we look at design tips for small bedrooms.

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