When you get ready for sleep, you want your bedroom to be inviting. Make it a warm and comfortable space where the hassles and stresses of life melt away, leaving you able to relax and unwind. To achieve this, choose the right furnishings and accessories – and add a touch of creativity to your bedroom. Coming up, we’ll give you some useful tips on what kinds of surroundings will transform your bedroom into a relaxing haven.

The bed

The bed in your room is your primary piece of furniture. It’s also the item you’ll utilise the most and it will have the biggest impact on your life. It affects how well you sleep and the consequences of a good or bad night’s sleep carry on throughout your day. Therefore, having the right bed is very important for your physical and mental well-being. Finding the right bed can be a complicated task and several factors affect whether a bed is right for you.

The size of your bed can also greatly affect how inviting your room is. There are a lot of different sizes of beds on the market and it might be tempting to get the biggest bed possible that you can roll over and stretch out with space to spare. However, that’s not always a good idea. Having a bed that’s too large can make your room feel cramped. When you squeeze all of your other furniture into your room, you’ll probably feel as if you’re sleeping in a claustrophobic, cluttered mess. It’s important to pick a bed that’s large enough to accommodate your needs, but doesn’t fill every spare inch of your room.

Choosing a bed that’s too small can have the reverse effect. Your room might feel spacious and open, but your bed will feel too cramped for restful sleep. It’s best to go with a practical sized bed that accommodates you and your partner, but also keeps the room feeling as if there’s plenty of space to move around and accommodate other furnishings.

The firmness of the mattress you choose is dependant upon what you personally find comfortable – and what special requirements you might have for your body size & shape, physical ailments, preferred sleep position and so on. Mattresses are available in a wide variety of firmness levels; they can vary from extremely soft to extremely firm, with all the gradations in-between. Most people want one that’s somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

If you need some help finding mattresses and bed sets, you can check out some of these mattresses for sale and see if there’s one that ticks all your boxes.

Lighting

Lighting sets the mood for your room. You don’t want a super bright bedroom when it’s the place in which you’re trying to relax and unwind. Equally, you probably don’t want a room that’s pitch black when you wake up in the morning. The perfect lighting is in between – bright enough so you can still move around safely or do things, but it doesn’t give the room the feeling that it’s permanently midnight!

When choosing lighting, you have to take the natural lighting from windows into account and plan your artificial light sources around that. Lampshades can drastically alter the lighting in a room and come in a huge variety of designs and options – whether it be ambient lighting to create mood, or task lighting to read. Obviously, lamps should be visually appealing, but at the same time not too distracting.

Try to choose a lampshade that spreads the light out evenly, but does so in a way that makes the lighting very gentle on the eyes. If you need more help on picking the correct shade, this article will be helpful.

Colour palette and its effect on your mood

The colour palette used in your bedroom is extremely important when trying to create a relaxing and inviting bedroom. Bright, over-the-top, engaging colours will stimulate your mind in ways that prevent you from relaxing and falling asleep. On the other hand, some darker colours can make your room depressing and uninviting. Many people opt for schemes that incorporate a mostly neutral colour palette with splashes of highlight colours – perhaps coffee or chocolate hues – or pops of something a little brighter that gives you a lift in the morning without being overpowering at night time. Forbes has an excellent feature on bedroom design that covers colour schemes if you need further reading.

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