Home: How to make the most of smaller bedrooms

It's all about height and proportions when it comes to interior design in miniature master bedrooms and bijou sleeping spaces

French Connection Zinc double bedframe in Forest Green velvet, €1429, available exclusively at DFS.

Small bedrooms can be a shoulder-raising struggle, and if you’ve sliced and diced a larger master as I have, you’ll understand the slightly uneasy feeling of the walls coming in just that bit closer. Some families will turn a larger bedroom over to a senior, student, adult child or a pair of siblings.

Where we don’t have actual square metres, we can evoke the feeling of more space, and with a following wind, this dinky, formerly claustrophobic room may become your favourite.

Window treatments

This is the time to consider losing curtains completely.

They have a visual heft and material invasion that makes most small rooms feel more crowded, especially taken to the floor.

Blinds can perform perfectly in terms of privacy and even thermal efficiency, and pale colours will help to bounce light around the room. Matching blinds to the wall colour, they will all but disappear. Unlike pillars of choking double-lined curtains, blinds can be pulled up and completely away from the reveal, connecting you to the views beyond.

Leg it

Large monoliths of furniture can weigh the space down to the floor, and where that space is limited, this will underscore that pinch you’re in.

Where you can use lithe, legged divans and storage furniture to allow the eye to travel across the floor and back to the wall, far further than it would collide with blank doors and drawers. If you like mid-century there are dozens of beautiful frame styles that suspend a drawer. Tapering legs will maximise the grace of a heavier supporting leg to a bed or wardrobe.

No colour blocks

You might not know you’re doing it, but by having separate colours for the skirting, wall and ceiling, the eye is jumping around three smaller surfaces and the impression can be suffocating.

A white guestroom with a wall of glass retains a celestial sense of utter calm. A low bed frame with kick-out legs and an unusual vintage table have been deployed rather than a standard height divan and locker. Linens by French Bedroom in Breton Cloud Stripe.

One light, soft colour or pure white taken over the ceiling wall and skirting delivers a lighter, airier flow.

Keep in mind, as you are physically closer to any print on the walls, keep it to scale, or nosing that life-size rubber-plant print will be nauseating, not nice. Using a reflective sheen in wallpaper, paint or even fabric applied to the wall, start with perfectly smooth plaster, as dimples and flecks of gypsum will be highly visible under any fine materials in tight quarters.

Ceiling play

Don’t push a bed towards a low ceiling with high legs, or it will just draw it down even further. Paler ceilings can push back a lower room (anything approaching 2.4m is low by today’s standards, where 2.6m is more usual in bedrooms). 

A tonal scheme and the use of boutique hotel hacks including wall lights to the bed delivers a small bedroom with massive style appeal. The floor matches the wardrobe door material, an unusual choice that blurs the edges of the surfacing, indicating more room;  essentialhome.eu.

If the ceiling is lower, it’s best that the bed, any chair, sofa and bed lockers follow — try dropping them down even 100mm — it can make all the difference.

Vintage stools and furniture not strictly intended as lockers can be implemented beautifully.

Vertical thrust

Furnishing, artwork, and even colour play can crank the ceiling back, and when our eye is drawn up, we perceive the room as being bigger than the sum of its square metres. 

Built-in storage (and we’re not talking about a hideous listing 1970s arrangement of beauty board) can surround a bed or even a small sofa on one wall, for a decadent, cosy chamber. Inexpensive modular furniture like the Ikea Billy can be hacked into Regency bookcases.

This velvet bed is staged on a pale floor. The clever use of pendant lights pulls the ceiling a little lower.

Check out the many adventures of DIY have-a-go design heroes on Instagram.

Vertically inclined wallpapers in vines or stripes, pier mirrors, and tall, elegant designs of headboard, again exaggerate that standard ceiling height. Nothing too clunky, please.

Fly up the wall

Lighting taken off the bedside lockers onto the wall provides more surface space for clocks, cups of tea and even a houseplant. 

Learn from your last hotel stay and include easy-to-reach controls while lying prone and dimmable technology to alter the mood to suit yours.

Floating, cantilever bedside tables or pieces balanced on a single leg will again lift the weight from the floor and reveal more square metres.

Handle-free

If you’re sucking in while moving around the bed (do try to go no less than 600mm-800mm at the sides for comfort’s sake), handles and knobs to storage elements can poke out a rude reminder that we’re in the land of compromise.

Push action drawers and cupboards will come to you.

If there’s no storage at the end of the bed you can get away with 600mm, concentrate on having room for manoeuvre as you rise.

Wardrobe doors that slide won’t invade your space like swing doors.

Bed sizing

Scaling the bed to the room and its accompanying furniture is the single most important thing you can do to make this a room to dream about. For tiny spaces, cabin beds and bunks can deal with eaves and impossible measurements.

Murphy (wall) beds spell desperation in my mind, but some executively styled communal living spaces offer them as standard to morph a living room into a bedroom. 

For single twins, leave 500mm-600mm between the beds, even If you’re forced to place them against two long walls. A centred bedside locker can accommodate both with wall lights for more autonomy for each sleeper. 

If storage demands are defeating you, include drawers to a divan bed.

Mirror, mirror

If you find you have a blank corner that’s not helping the room’s chic see if a floor-standing pier mirror leaned onto the wall can help. This breaks open the wall, and flings light around the room.

Punch holes in the walls and multiple light with a clever mirror choice. This vertical mirror also draws the eye upward in a smaller bedroom, Melody Maison. Find similar mirrors at Sklum and Kave Home.

Facing a mirror to grab available natural light from a window really can be transformative. If you have built-in or free-standing bookcases with boxed areas, consider adding mirrors to the back of some of the niches. This not only adds some aesthetic interest but doubles light playing around the area. 

Mirrored wardrobes? Explore the discussion around energy reflections before taking this dramatically impactful and often uncomfortable decorative step if the robes are facing the foot of your bed.

Dress light

Busy patterns and layers of bedclothes and a mountain of pillows and quilts will add aesthetic stutter to a small space. Choose white and pale linen in butter-soft quality and make the bed.