A Bedroom With One Good Lamp

A bedroom is the easiest room in a house to get right and the one most people leave until last, probably because nobody else sees it. It is also the room where the difference between good and bad lighting is most obvious, because it is the only room you are regularly in when it is dark outside.

Spend the money on the lamp, not the bed

This is the one room where I would flip the usual advice. The bed is the biggest and most expensive thing in it, and it is also the thing you cannot see once it is made and cannot feel at all once you are asleep. A good second-hand wooden frame does everything a new one does.

The mattress is a different question and not one to be clever about. But the frame is a frame.

What you do notice, every single night, is the light. A bedside lamp you like reaching for, that puts light on the page and not on the ceiling, is worth more per euro than anything else in the room.

Measure the mattress before you buy the frame

The one real risk with an old bed. Mattress sizes have moved around, and they are different from country to country: a French 140, a Dutch 140 and a UK double are not the same thing. An old frame may be an inch or two off in a way that no mattress on sale now will fit.

Measure the inside of the frame, rails included, and take that number with you. If it is close but not exact, a mattress slightly too small is liveable and one slightly too large is not.

Two lights, and both of them low

One ceiling light in a bedroom is the worst lighting in the house. You want two sources, both below eye level when you are standing: a lamp on each side of the bed, or one lamp and one floor lamp where there is no space for a table.

Warm bulbs, 2700K or lower, and put them on a dimmer if you can. The half hour before sleep is the whole reason this room exists.

The chair is not for clothes

Every bedroom chair becomes the clothes chair. The only thing I have found that helps is buying a chair small enough and good enough that putting a jumper on it feels like a waste of it, and then putting a basket next to it for the things that were going to end up there anyway.

It does not work completely. It works better than a big chair and no basket.

What I have left out

No rug on this list, and no curtains, and both for the same reason: they are worth choosing in the room rather than from a photograph. Colour on a screen is never the colour that arrives, and a bedroom is the room where getting the darkness right matters most. Those two I would buy last, in person, once everything else is in.