Minimal and Stylish Bedrooms

Minimal decor is all about eliminating unnecessary clutter in your interior space, and even if the rest of your house is replete with tribal designs and bright colors, you might want to consider toning things down in your bedroom. For most homeowners, the bedroom is the place they go to decompress and relax, which means that keeping this room's design simple might be just what you need to get a good night's sleep. If you're having a hard time slimming down the furniture and decor in your bedroom, however, here are some tips that can help you go minimalist with ease.

Contrast White Walls with a Colorful Bed

In general, minimal decor doesn't mix well with lots of colors. If you constrain your colors to one area of your bedroom, however, you'll have a chance to pull off a design style that will impress your friends and family whenever they come and visit.

After you've eliminated any features in your bedroom that don't belong there and picked a simple shade of white paint for your walls, choose a new bed design that features a bright color. Primary colors work great for this purpose, and you can also try green or purple.

To achieve this effect, it's best to pick a bed design that's low to the ground and doesn't have a headboard or a footboard. Exposed side slats help you flaunt your colorful bed, and keep in mind that your eye-catching bed should be one of the only points of color in your otherwise monochrome bedroom.

Set up a Multi-Tasking Tasteful Chair

As you search for ways to reduce the clutter in your bedroom, your nightstands might be some of the first pieces of furniture you identify as being unnecessary. However, it's undeniably useful to have a place next to your bed where you can put books and glasses of water, so the thought of parting with your precious nightstands might be a little bit discouraging.

However, if you simply repurpose an unused kitchen chair, you can enjoy all of the benefits of a bedside table while also proving a place where you or your guests can sit. As you look through the chairs that you have at your disposal, try to pick a seat that's relatively flat. Otherwise, you might wake up to an uncomfortable puddle on the floor after your water glass spills in the middle of the night.

As a slight variant of this idea, you can also equip your bedside with a low stool. These types of furniture are usually flatter than kitchen chairs, which means that they serve as great impromptu beside tables.

Try Suspending Your Lights

In the spirit of saving space, you might find yourself contemplating the possibility of removing the lamps that flank your bedside. However, there's a way that you can minimize your floor space while still providing enough illumination to read comfortably at night.

If you hang your bedside lights from the ceiling, you'll create an avant-garde ambiance in your bedroom without having to sacrifice your precious bedside lights. You may want to suspend bare bulbs from your ceiling if you want to achieve a more industrial look, but small paper lanterns or hanging lamps with shades also achieve this effect quite nicely.

When it comes to wiring, you can either choose hanging lamps with switches or wire these lights into switches next to your bed. Try a chain-link hanging apparatus if you don't like the appearance of a bare black cord.

Make Your Nightstands Float

There's something about expanded floor space that is indicative of minimal style, and there's a way that you can expand the blank spaces in your room without having to minimize the convenience that you currently enjoy.

Instead of picking nightstands that stand up off the floor, attach these useful bedroom features to the wall behind your bed. Floating nightstands can be as simple as stand-alone shelves, or you can step things up a notch by building some contoured blocks that seem to hover effortlessly above your floor.

String up Some Lights

If you're stumped as to how you'll increase the empty space in your bedroom without compromising on lighting, remember that there are space-efficient illumination options at your disposal that also don't break the bank. While you might only think to pull out your strings of white lights around Christmas, you can take a strand out of the box at any other time of the year to bathe your bedroom in a comfortable diffuse glow.

You can use a couple of unobtrusive nails to string up your lights horizontally above your bed, or you can opt to drape your lights over a single thumbtack next to your bedside for a more vertical effect. If you want, you could even go so far as to line the trim between your ceiling and your bedroom walls with white lights; these lights won't take up much space, but they will make your bedroom feel comfortable and soothing.

Try an Industrial Look with a Plywood Headboard

Picking out a new headboard can be hard, which is why you might want to cut the Gordian knot and use a simple piece of lumber instead. A standard piece of plywood is just about the perfect size to sit sideways at the head of your bed, and this industrial-style solution won't put you back much in your decor budget.

Unfinished plywood looks simultaneously edgy and laid-back, but if you like to stretch your arms when you wake up in the morning, you might want to take precautions to avoid getting splinters. Before you put your plywood headboard in place, take a moment to sand its surface with a power sander, and don't forget to round down the corners as well.