Previous Story
The Ultimate Guide to a Beautiful Bedroom
Your bedroom is the one place in your whole house that needs to be perfect. You can make an awkward kitchen work, you can figure out a strategy for a tiny bathroom, but if you can’t sleep well in your bedroom, you are really going to suffer.
Getting a full night of blissful sleep isn’t just a luxury (although, we all know that luxury is the best way to describe it!) it is a necessity. You need a good block of sleep between 7-9 hours to keep you healthy and well rested. Overtiredness isn’t just a toddler thing, adults get grumpy when they haven’t had enough sleep too!
So how should you make sure that your bedroom is doing as much as possible to give you the gift of good sleep?
Bed in
Your bed is, obviously, the foundation of the whole room so you need to get a good one. Try out lots of different mattresses to see which one is the comfiest and make sure that you get the right size bed. If you are sleeping with a partner, make sure that your mattress fits you both in comfortably – cuddling is nice, but you need space to stretch out too! A bigger bed is usually best and the right pillow makes a huge difference.
Your sheets are important too and you should make sure you get the right size for your mattress. If you are in doubt, or you have an irregular size, king size sheets are a good bet. A high thread count will bring you the most comfort, especially if you have sensitive skin. Organic cotton is a popular choice too, as well as silk and even hypoallergenic fabric made using bamboo!
Use Neutral Colours
When you are in your bedroom, you need to have an instant sense of calm. It needs to make you feel sleepy and ready to climb into bed for a good night’s rest. This means that you shouldn’t use any bright colours, vivid patterns or other things that stimulate your senses. Stick to a soft palette of creams, whites and even greys to give your eyes a break from the brightness in the rest of your house.
Staying neutral doesn’t have to mean boring though. You can use different fabrics and finishes to create a luxurious hotel feel with just a single color in many shades. Grey is especially good for this as dark walls will add drama during the day but will recede in the dark of night. Choose soft velvet throws, faux fur cushions and greyed wooden furniture to get the look.
Remove Any Unnecessary Items
Ideally, your bedroom would contain your bed, a couple of bedside tables, a lamp or two and that’s it. Unfortunately, unless you have a huge house, this simply isn’t going to happen. However, you might have some things that would be better suited to another room that you can move out. For example, a bookshelf could move to the living room.
Once you have cleared anything that can feasibly live elsewhere, floor to ceiling wardrobes and cupboards are your friends. Store everything behind closed doors to create the illusion of a space dedicated to slumber. You can even make use of award spaces with bespoke designs. Wardrobes are also great at hiding mirrors on the inside doors – their reflective surfaces will brighten up your room with even the smallest glint through the curtains.
Keep it Tidy
Even with a neutral room, your brain is going to have a hard time going into standby if your room is a mess of clutter. Clear your surfaces of anything you don’t need out all the time. Use a small set of jewelry drawers on top of a dresser if you don’t want to use a big drawer on your accessories.
Make sure that you clean your bedroom and change the sheets regularly too. Fresh sheets feel like such a luxury but again, washing them regularly is also a necessity. All sorts of bacteria and fungus gather in your sheets, not to mention dead skin and natural oils from your hair and skin. You should also consider washing your pillows, throws and duvet covers every so often too. Hoover round and polish surfaces once a week to combat dust.
Keep it Cool
If you’ve ever spent a long summer night sweating with too much heat, you will know that being too hot is not conducive to a good sleep. When you are ready to fall asleep, your core body temperature drops, making you feel tired. This is why a cool bedroom is always better than a warm one, as it encourages your body to relax.
Another good reason to keep your bedroom cool is a study that has shown sleeping in temperatures between 60-68 degrees allows your body to release melatonin. What does this do? It’s only the best natural anti-aging hormone!
So there it is. Sleep cool to fall asleep quickly and look younger for it.
Mood Lighting
Back in the good old days, when humans didn’t have lights on all the time and back lit technologies like phones and TVs, we relied on the sun to know when it was time to sleep. As the sun went down, like birds flocking to the trees, we would just get comfy and get some shut eye. Now though, we can easily stretch our days and interrupt our circadian rhythm – completely ignoring the sun and doing our own thing.
To combat this, you should really avoid looking at screens for the 2-3 hours before you go to bed. If this proves difficult, you can use blue-blocking glasses to look at the screen or use the nighttime setting on your phone to remove the blue wavelengths from the display. On the other hand, bright lights throughout the day will have a beneficial impact, making you feel happier and more awake.
Your nighttime lighting will also have an effect. Try not to use bright main lights as you get ready for bed. Instead use smaller lamps or fairy lights – the classic ‘mood lighting’. You could also use an alarm clock that replicates sunrise and sunset for you if you can’t get to sleep or wake up in the morning. These clocks have been pioneered by a British company who tackle other light-related issues like SAD, so could be a really good investment if you are struggling.
Sleep is such an important part of life that you need to do everything you can to make sure that your bedroom will deliver you the shut eye you really need. Keeping your sleep pattern regular and your lighting low at night and bright in the morning will definitely help to keep you on the right track too. It’s all about finding the right balance.
A calm space is so important for allowing you to get some rest. You need to think of your bedroom as an escape from the daily clutter and chaos of family life. If there is one space that can be truly yours to luxuriate in, it has to be your bedroom – the kitchen and bathroom can wait!
Take your time coming up with a design to suit you, factoring in everything that needs to be in that room and all the things that could live in another room. Give yourself the gift of beautiful soft sheets and cosy cushions and throws as well as a good mattress and pillows. Make your bedroom so perfect that you might just want to go into hibernation – could there be a better place to be?
