Stuck on how to style a beautiful bed for your daughter
while still on a budget?
Well here on the blog I want to share some designer tips to help you pull together a stylish space that wont break the bank. I used all these tips when decorating my own daughter’s bed so I know they will work for you as well.
The canopy with fairy lights creates such a cosy, lovely space to spend time in. My daughter loves the rust and green tones so I worked with that colour scheme and used smaller amounts of grey, blue and beige to keep the room looking individual and interesting.
1. Create a canopy above the bed
A canopy creates such a beautiful sense of enclosure and cosiness and changes the feel of the room. Canopies work really well if you have quite a large bedroom space and you’d like to create more of a bed ‘zone’ within the room. That being said, my daughter’s room is quite small but the canopy hasn’t made it feel smaller instead it has made the space it a lot more interesting and enjoyable to be in.
I created my canopy on a budget by using ready made curtains from Spotlight. I found that there was lots of beautiful colour options in muted tones and also linen/linen look fabrics that you could choose from.
I recommend choosing two layers of curtains if you don’t want the canopy to be see-through, and you could source a more affordable inner fabric to complement the top fabric to keep costs down. You could look for a patterned fabric or something with tassels, depending on your style and theme.
For the top of my canopy I made a circular wire frame and threaded the top of the curtains around the frame.
To attach the canopy to the ceiling I choose three lengths of thick ribbon and attached them at equal points around the frame. You may need to play around with the size of your frame, as you need to be able to fit all the curtain fabric around it, and also keep the frame balanced.
2. Use lots of mood lighting
It’s quite amazing what lovely soft lighting to do for a space, and most girls I know love some variation of fairy lights to create that cosy vibe.
I chose some fairy lights from IKEA and threaded them through the top of the canopy as there is a power point close to the bed. If this isn’t an option for you, look for other places in the room that you could add some fairy lights as the effect will be equally as lovely!
3. Up cycle a bed of your choice
The best way to keep your budget in check is to up cycle the bed itself. There are so many options out there on Marketplace or Gumtree and once you know the dimensions the bed needs to be you can start searching with confidence.
To check the dimensions I suggest you measure up the space that the bed needs to fit in with masking tape and write all your measurements down to refer to.
For my daughter’s room we found a lovely IKEA bunk bed that we painted to match the wall colour. One mistake we made though was to paint the bed in the wall paint, instead of a semi-gloss paint that would be more hard wearing so we are starting to see some paint peeling off in places. So make sure you get the right paint for each application!
Depending on your style you could quite easily recover a bed head in your favourite fabric or spray paint a metal bed in a gorgeous tone, the options are endless and pretty affordable.
4. Choose linen that complements your colour scheme
Often less is more when it comes to children’s bedroom colour schemes. I don’t mean you can’t add lots of colour to the space but in terms, of wall colour sometimes it works best to keep things simple. If you love the idea of bold colour on the walls then go for it, but remember the same colour on all four walls works more cohesively than lots of different colours. But I digress, as I want to talk about bed linen for your daughter’s room…
When choosing bed linen it can be helpful to refer to a colour wheel to see how your wall colour will look with other colours you have in mind. You can order a physical colour wheel otherwise search online to look at colour options for the space.
Often designers will use the colour wheel to choose colours but then choose tones that are muted or greyed down for a more subtle look.
If you are going with a white or neutral wall colour, then you could choose 2-3 main colours you love and choose your quilt cover, cushions and throws within these.
5. Include cushions of different shapes and sizes
Sourcing cushions of different shapes and sizes is a tip Interior designers use all the time. Choosing different sized cushions allows the fabrics of all the cushions to be seen a one time even if they are stacked in front of each other. This is what I mean:
Decide which colour or patterned fabric you want to have as a feature and this will be one of your smaller cushions.
Decide what other 1-2 colours or patterns you want as a background feature and choose these cushions to be bigger again as they will sit behind the feature cushion.
What about different sized cushions?
Well when you choose different shaped cushions you are sourcing like a designer and your daughter’s bed will look more sophisticated and balanced as a result. What shapes work well for cushions?
Choose at least one round cushion to break up all the squares and rectangles that are more common when styling a bed.
Choose a larger square cushion and perhaps a rectangular cushion (that is smaller than the pillow case if you are using the pillow case as a display cushion also).
Here you can see how the different sizes and shapes of cushions adds interest. My daughter and I love the tartan wool cushion so I made sure the round linen one was small enough that we could still see it!
So that’s my four tips for you! I hope this blog has shown you that it is more than possible to style a beautiful bed for your daughter’s room on a budget. I hope these designer tips will l give you confidence and a bit of a plan as you tackle your daughter’s space.
Happy styling and I hope you feel ready to go and make it happen,