3 Tips for Furnishing, Lighting, and Decorating a Guest Bedroom
There’s a lot of pressure to keep your guests happy. Even the most easy-going, happy-just-to-be-here houseguests can cause us to lapse into ‘host/hostess mode’ and start nit-picking over the smallest details.
The trick is to know when to relax and let the prep shoulder the not-so-enjoyable parts of hosting – and, for us, that begins with having a well-appointed and inviting guest bedroom ready and waiting. Whether your house is apt to see drop-ins or the long-awaited, it always pays off to have more than a spare room with a bed and coat rail waiting.
Then again, the guest bedroom is one of the trickier rooms to decorate. It’s common to feel more than a little creatively ‘stifled’. Here are a few of our favourite tips for overcoming the decorator’s block and making the most of that empty room upstairs.
1. Focus on Decorative Rather Than Ambient Lighting
Chances are, any visitors to your guest room will spend most of their time in the main house. The guest bedroom will represent that end-of-the-day haven from socialising. However good the company, we all know the pleasure of the retreat, and creating a guest bedroom that perfectly facilitates that transition from noise to silence, a busy mind to a still mind, is the best way to keep your houseguests feeling happy and at-home.
Clever use of accent lighting is, for us, by far the best way to create that welcoming vibe. We’ve written about the differences between decorative, ambient, and accent lighting in a lot more detail in our guide to the different types of lighting for the home, but the key difference to remember is that, while ambient lighting is provided by the starker, brighter overhead lights, decorative lighting is what you get form your lamps and other focused lighting.
Decorative lighting can be layered throughout the room, and this is what will really help you to capture the cosy, comfortable tone you’re looking for.
2. Pick a few key furnishings rather than filling every bit of space
Generally, we know when a room is finished. It’s a feeling that the space has been sufficiently filled and decorated and is ready to be lived in. The guest bedroom can be a little trickier, however; since we don’t tend to spend any real stretches of time in it, it can be stuck feeling a little ‘unfinished’ even when it’s more than fit for purpose.
This is, however, a slippery slope toward overburdening a single room with too much in the way of furniture and décor. While you want it to have a little more soul than a hotel, try to take a leaf out of the hotelier’s handbook by focusing on the essentials first, then adding a couple of extras just to tie it all together.
A bed outfitted with a good handful of decorative cushions, a do-it-all piece of furniture like a slipper chair to fill the corner, or a bench placed across the foot of the bed, a wardrobe and dressing table will be more than enough. Coupled with some layered lighting and a statement wallpaper or curtain fabric, and your guests will have the ultimate retreat waiting for them.
It can be tempting to turn into the ‘hummingbird’ host who wants to make sure that every single one of their guests needs (and potential needs) are pre-emptively covered and seen-to before the invite is even extended. If you want your guests to be relaxed, however, then the key is to lean toward simplicity, rather than obsessing over the details. A bed, a chair, and somewhere to hang their clothes is often enough.
3. Avoid ‘too much unison’
We said above how it’s worth taking a leaf out of the hotelier’s handbook but, after that, it’s a better idea to throw the entire handbook off to the side.
Hotel rooms tend to be very clearly built around a theme. At times, it’s a distinctive colour scheme – others, an equally distinctive pattern that is echoed across elements like the wallpaper, curtains, bedding, and even the wall art. Uniformity is the name of the game and, somewhere like a hotel, it works.
A guest bedroom is, for obvious reasons, a little different, and it’s worth embracing that difference by refusing to hold yourself back on reflecting your tastes a within it. Layering a handful of patterns across your soft furnishings – and, if you think it will work for the room, your wallpaper. You can read our full guide to layering fabrics throughout the room here for more inspiration.