Does your dream apartment have a small bedroom? Don’t despair. A small bedroom is not a disadvantage for you – provided you furnish it adequately and design it appropriately. Find out here how to create storage space unobtrusively and what else you need to consider when furnishing a small bedroom.
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Of course, every room in an apartment is important and should be at least functional, better still, pretty to look at, as well as reflect the residents’ personality. However, the bedroom always takes on a special position because it is where we want to recharge our batteries to get going again the next day. So there must be a cozy sleeping atmosphere, not a rumpus chamber atmosphere. The size of the bedroom is less relevant than its design and furnishings. Therefore, even a small bedroom can provide storage space, coziness, and tranquility. We provide you with some ideas.
Five Tricks to Make a Small Bedroom Look Bigger
A small bedroom does not have to cause claustrophobia in us. If you follow a few basic rules, the room can seem much larger than it is. With these five tips, your small bedroom will come out big:
- If the bedroom has many or large windows, you can generally opt for a design with darker colors, even if the room is rather small. For example, if the room has little daylight because it is on the north side, you should choose a lighter design.
- You can make a narrow bedroom look more spacious by painting the walls but leaving the lower area (from the floor to about window height) lighter. The ceiling should also be painted light for an airy effect.
- Decide on a decorating style and choose matching colors and patterns that work well together. Repeat this mix of colors and patterns in several places and objects distributed across the room. The room radiates calm when all colors come from one color family – this goes down to the color-matching bed linen. Sounds boring to you? Try using different materials to create visual differences. Tip: Plants in the bedroom also provide color variety without violating the style of the room or disturbing the basic colors.
- Install a mirror, preferably on the opposite side of the window. This way, it will serve as a practical decoration and reflect daylight.
- Hang curtains above the flooring, stretch the wall, and make the room look higher.
Tips for Sloping Ceilings in the Bedroom
Furnish a small bedroom, which then also has a sloping roof. A difficult combination, but no reason to despair. The important thing is to make the most of the sloping roof – this means furniture at the height of the knee – that is, at the height of the free area between the upper edge of the floor covering and the beginning of the sloping roof. The best furniture for this purpose is individually adapted to your sloping roof. Since this involves handcrafted custom work, so individual pieces are usually expensive.
A cheaper option is to convert existing furniture yourself. For example, modular shelves or step-shaped shelving systems can be adapted to the roof’s slope by extending the depth or length of the boards and raising them using small wooden blocks or pedestals.
Simple & effective idea
Depending on the sloping roof’s length and the kneeler’s height, you could also convert a simple bench without a backrest and place it on the sloping roof as a storage area. The shelf space underneath can be wonderfully used for books, magazines, or boxes.
You could also place the bed with the headboard under the sloping roof and thus use the space wisely. If you then position it directly under the skylight, you’ll even have the option of counting the stars to fall asleep. Speaking of windows, small bedrooms with sloping ceilings are great for skylights, which you can use as a balcony – this will give you more light in the room and add a little fresh air to your bedroom.
How to Create Hidden Storage Space in Small Bedrooms?
Of course, even if you set up a small bedroom, you need storage space for everything essential and to prevent chaos. After all, an untidy room looks even smaller. But where to put all the stuff? Stay away from large, bulky, dark furniture. Such chests of drawers, sideboards, or cabinets can quickly make the room feel full and squeezed. Unobtrusive such pieces of furniture are not at all. Small, delicate, and light furniture, as well as the courage to open spaces, would be visually the better choice, but this also gives less and often visible storage space, which makes for more visual clutter. On the other hand, if you can find narrow but deep pieces of furniture, you can confidently place them in a smaller room because the depth visually takes up less space than the width.
Of course, you could also say now: Take the opportunity offered with a small bedroom and clean out your closet properly; less is more, and minimalism liberates. But the reduced lifestyle and rigorous cleaning out do not suit everyone. So if you can not place your closet outside the small bedroom, then a built-in wardrobe would be an optimal and discreet solution. Another solution, which is also visually suitable for decorating small bedrooms, would be a wardrobe in the same color as the wall or a cabinet with mirrored or glass doors that reflect the light and thus distract from the wardrobe.
However, multifunctional furniture is still the best way to provide more storage space in a small bedroom unobtrusively. The classic storage space in small bedrooms is in multifunctional furniture. Number one: the bed. However, we don’t recommend the classic sofa bed in the long run – your back will thank you. However, if you are still looking for a combination solution for a small guest room, a sofa bed with drawers is certainly not the worst solution.
However, you have more choices in your small bedroom. If you are still fit and not afraid of heights, a loft bed might be the right piece of furniture for you – this will give you more storage space between the floor and the sleeping surface and even room for furniture. If you prefer to sleep closer to the floor, a bed with a bed base would also be an option to create additional storage space. The third option would be to fill the space between the bed and the floor with color-matched under-bed boxes and crates that can be used to store vacuum bags of winter clothes, for example. The boxes, which come in different sizes and heights, could also be covered with a mini-curtain placed around the bed frame. However, if you want to arrange your bedroom following the Feng Shui teachings, this storage option is unsuitable because the boxes and crates under the bed block the flow of Qi.
Further inconspicuous storage space can be hidden in the bedstead’s headboard by recessing narrow but deep shelves on the left and right sides. These fit more than you can imagine at first glance. Seating furniture or stools with a folding function and chests that find their place at the foot of the bed also provides additional storage space. More obscure than convertible seating furniture, on the other hand, are standing mirrors, the inside or back of which consists of shelves and in which, for example, there is enough space for storing necklaces, rings, and co. Of course, you can also hang a visually appealing, traditional mirror cabinet. However, make sure that the mirrors are not placed or hung directly in front of the bed because, according to Feng Shui, this makes for restless sleep, as the Qi is reflected and multiplied. As a result, your body will be overloaded during sleep and unable to relax.
Flexible storage space in small bedrooms offers boxes and boxes, which are placed on cabinets, shelves, or as a substitute for side tables in corners, and their shades should naturally fit into the color scheme to be inconspicuous.
The right lighting for a small bedroom
The light source of the first choice, even if you furnish a small bedroom, is, of course, daylight. At the same time, the window should be as large as possible, but not destroy your privacy and also not take up too much valuable wall space that could be used for shelves or decoration. In terms of windows and privacy, by the way, privacy films can help. In this context, however, it is essential that some films no longer provide privacy if there is light on in the room behind them.
As with any room, the following applies to a small bedroom: indirect lighting, for example, with a strip of LED lights around the mirror or along the headboard of the bed, creates a cozy atmosphere and is, therefore, always a good idea. Additional individual lamps provide functionality, for example, to get the right clothes out of the closet early in the morning or still be able to read in the evening.
Be careful with pendant lights: They should be used only in the bedroom if the appropriate ceiling height ensures you can still walk under them comfortably. In addition, the lamp itself should not cast a large shadow on the floor – otherwise, it will make the room visually smaller. Spotlights whose individual lamps can be turned in different directions, floor lamps, or even table and reading lamps for the nightstand are the better choice when decorating a small bedroom.
However, when choosing lamps, ensure they produce warm light, and the light level is not too bright. Spotlights built directly into the ceiling can provide light in small rooms without wasting space. However, they are usually not suitable as the only source of light because it is difficult to illuminate corners and can not be moved flexibly.
