To sleep? Perchance to phone, text and watch TV, too!
Q. We spend a lot of time in our bedroom. Before we moved, we had plenty of space for a sofa to watch TV and for my home office (I do a lot of charity work). The bedroom in our new home is only average size. I need help making it work for our lifestyle.
A. You will be encouraged by interior designer and author Chris Madden, home fashions mogul and TV savant (HGTV and Oprah's first design correspondent). The photo we show here is Chris' own bedroom, and, yes, it's hardly space-starved, as Madden writes in her handsome book profiling “The Soul of a House” (Rizzoli).
But before she arrived at such elegance, Madden says she developed her own ideas for enabling a bedroom to cope with multi-tasking … such as “late-evening or early morning work emails and phone calls, daily exercise routines, catching our favorite TV shows …” all the while keeping the main focus on “being able to turn off from our daily routine and just relax.”
Madden's strategy: “Divide a bedroom into ‘zones,' no matter the size of the room. Have a space to do your office work, a space to exercise, a space to watch TV, and then space to put away all these things that can prevent us from relaxing.”
She suggests storing the flat-screen TV in an armoire. Ditto exercise equipment. Hide cardio gear in a closet or under a bed (“or in a pretty basket”), and “for the office work that never seems to end,” keep phone and iPad in a night table drawer to muffle “those pesky ‘dings' and vibrations as emails come in.”
If you need a desk in your master bedroom, Madden advises, do as she once did: “Consider a makeshift desk that fits in a closet. We had no space in the bedroom itself, but luckily I had a double-door closet, so I used filing cabinets as a ‘base,' and placed a sturdy piece of wood above them. I then covered the wood with black-and-white pictures of my family, and, in turn, covered that with a piece of glass. Voila! — instant desk that was out of the way when I didn't need to work at it.”
More of Madden's life-enhancing ideas: think of the five senses — sight, sound, taste, touch and smell.
• Sight: Paint your room in a color that speaks to you. A good place to start is off-white or a spa green or robin's egg blue … jewel tones aren't ideal for a bedroom.
• Sound: There's nothing more relaxing than your favorite music playing in your bedroom sanctuary. Alternative: a white-noise machine.
• Taste: Hide a minifridge in an armoire.
• Touch: Soft bed linens are so important. Crawling into bed should be like being on a cloud, I feel. The higher the thread count, the softer they should be, so 300+ is ideal. No need for a ton of sets — two is enough. (Editor's note: Check out Madden's new designs for bed and bath at Sunham Home Fashions, sunham.com, and Idea Nuova Global, ideanuova.com.
• Smell: A favorite candle or bowl of potpourri can be a mood-lifter and relaxer. Fresh flowers also add great aroma and realistic faux flowers can provide a great visual.
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