Many months ago I posted about making a mood board for our bedroom, and a couple of weeks ago when I posted about finding a location for the hanging geometric himmeli gems I made, I included a teaser photo of our bedroom. I’ve been meaning to share a tour ever since, and here it is!

This is a room full of lots of doors, weird angles, and very uneven natural light. And yet none of those are complaints—I love our bedroom’s idiosyncrasies. They just make it more challenging to decorate (and photograph). But given the chance, I wouldn’t trade it for a more traditional room. The weirdness gives it character, and I’d be bored without a challenge. We tried to overcome some of the quirks, and others we embraced.

One of the big challenges was furniture placement. With the four doors (five if you count the French double doors as two), there aren’t very many places to put a queen bed without putting one side against a wall. In fact there’s really only one, and you’re looking at it. So everything else fell into place based on the bed location. The bed itself, though, is one of my favorite pieces of furniture. Before we moved into this house last year, our bed was on wooden pallets. We started looking into a real bed after we moved, but couldn’t quite find one we were excited about until we visited The Joinery. Their showroom is full of absurdly beautiful handmade wood furniture, so it was a dream come true to get this bed custom made out of live-edge wood.

The Schoolhouse Electric bedside lamps could’ve gone on the wall, but we attached them to the sloped ceiling instead. It’s one way in which we embraced the quirk, but they’re also super practical for saving space on the nightstand.

Without a lot of natural light, we thought a light paint color would be our best bet, but with the walls and the ceilings blending into one another in several places, it seemed that everything needed to be the same color. So we decided to go with a bright white (Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace). We knew we wanted to repaint last summer, but it gets really hot in here, so I decided to wait for the weather to cool down in the fall. And then, on September 14, 2014, I ended up in a wheelchair for two months. I took the universe’s lesson about procrastination pretty seriously, and we got to painting this spring as soon as I was able.

Along with the white paint, we tried to make up for the lack of windows with a couple of big mirrors to bounce the light around. One is part of my vanity, which I Frankensteined together out of a vintage vanity mirror that I mounted to the wall with a French cleat, and a West Elm console table. It works well as storage and a location to put on my makeup.

One thing that is not normally in this room is a giant, beautiful flower arrangement. But when your dear friends who have just gotten married ask you to take home gorgeous flowers at the end of the reception, you’d have to be an ungrateful idiot to say no. (Even if you’re walking home. Tip: pour out the water to cut down on weight.) I will note that the pink rose came from the rose bush in our yard, so I suppose I can take some credit for that.

See what I mean about doors and weird angles? The bathroom door itself is actually cut down on one corner to accommodate the ceiling angles.

I love this vintage wooden owl wall hook. He spreads his wings when you put something on the hook.


Ready for the best decorating lesson I’ve learned in the past year? It’s really next-level. Here goes: Try to match your rug to your pets. If you’ve got a pet with light-colored fur, there is no way you should be buying a black rug. We have a black and white Ikea rug in our dining room, and within 5 minutes of vacuuming it (or less), white fur becomes apparent on the black areas of the pattern. But the rug in our bedroom matches our cats extremely well. Before I bought it I looked up reviews, and the one complaint was that the rug shed for a long time (this seems to be a complaint with every shag rug, though, so I bought it anyway). But I didn’t even realize it was shedding at first because I thought the dust bunnies were the usual ones made of cat fur. If you’re not a pet-owner, or you have a magical furry creature that never sheds, this may seem gross. It makes a big difference, though. I guess this means that the reverse is also true: If you already have rugs, pick your pets to match.

I love how our room came together. It’s got a really soothing color palette, but the different textures keep it interesting. White facets kind of unintentionally became a theme. Isn’t it funny how something like that can emerge without you even realizing?

Sources
Paint: Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace

Furniture
Bed: The Joinery
Nightstands: West Elm
Storage ottoman: Target (reupholstered by me)
Library drawers: Vintage
Dressers: Vintage
Console/vanity: West Elm
Vanity mirror: Vintage

Lighting
Ceiling light: Ikea (same as the one in our bathroom)
Closet ceiling light: DIY
Wall scones: Schoolhouse Electric
Lamp on vanity: Anthropologie (several years old)
Lamp on dresser: Vintage (street find remade), with Target shade

Accessories
Rug: West Elm
Closet rug: Ikea
Green tray: DIY
Duvet cover: West Elm
Brass hanging planter: Vintage (similar-ish)
Hanging gems: DIY
Storage baskets: West Elm, Target (with some DIY tassels)
Standing mirror: CB2
Print on dresser: Hannah Stouffer
White planter: CB2
Geode boxes: DIY
Pegboard jewelry storage: DIY
Bedside clock: Sony
Brass birds: Vintage
Wooden owl hook: Vintage
Elephant painting: Painted by my husband, many years ago
Other accessories and art: Vintage, DIY, or I don’t remember