The bed occupies more space than any item in your house, including the bath, so how you dress it will determine the style of your room: tailored or casual, quilted or counterpaned, the choice is yours. Only you can decide between the security of familiar sheets and blankets, and the freedom from bed-making that a Continental quilt and fitted bottom sheet brings.
Be it plain or patterned, the top covering will introduce the biggest single jolt of colour to your room. Choose colour schemes wisely for your bed-linen to make a positive statement against the right back-ground.
Designer bed-linen provides pattern contrasts: one pattern for the base sheet and a variation for the Continental quilt cover, which is often reversible, with a different yet co-ordinated pillow-case pattern. Use geometric patterns for new angles, with stripes extending the eye visually along the length of the bed or broadening the area in a corridor-like room.
The minimalist who hides clutter behind cupboard doors and prefers to sleep simply upon a floor mattress will choose the purest bed dressing, without intricate patterning and many colours. The simplest is the futon - a Japanese mattress made from tufted cotton wadding layered inside a pure cotton cover. For a modern look, cover a futon with graphic-patterned fabric and top it off with two bolsters akin to Japanese headrests rather than pillows; for a softer effect, choose a pastel futon cover with traditional pillows covered in complementary colours as back- and armrests.
Futons and similar roll-up bedding often fill dual roles, doubling by day as a sofa. Sofabeds themselves seldom provide any daytime storage space for the pillows and coverings, unless you roll and cleat them like yachtsmen's sails to form a bolster. The more expensive convertible sofabeds are upholstered with detachable quilted covers that become the night-time Continental quilt. Or you can take a tip from an architect whose lightweight foam-block mattress is covered in tough but flimsy spinnaker sail fabric made up in all the colours of his studio bedroom. By day, it hangs from the wall and looks like an abstract painting.
The traditionalist will prefer sleeping upon a box-sprung bed raised fairly high from the floor. This bed could have a pleated valance to conceal the legs, and the formality of a fitted bedspread.
Dressing the bed does not end with the bed-linen. You can drape fabric on posts at the four corners or, more simply, create a canopy above with an interesting .fabric design to reflect upon when lying in bed. It is possible to make a four-poster bedroom without an actual four-poster bed: hang lightweight curtains from a ceiling rod that matches the bed base in size and shape, or suspend a simple length of fabric, perhaps a hand-blocked Indian sari, between two ceiling rods.
|
