While we’re often told that bedroom design should be peacefully sleep-inducing, no one wants a space that looks just plain boring. Fortunately, as these fabulous interiors show, bedrooms can combine a divinely dreamy feel with an inspiring dollop of drama.
Text Robyn Alexander
Photographs Greg Cox & Elsa Young
GOLD STANDARD
The spectacular master bedroom of an apartment in a storied Art Deco building was designed around its owner’s passion for the Bauhaus period and is filled with authentic vintage pieces as well as richly contrasting colours and textures. Glowing honey-coloured original parquet flooring is complemented by natural light, while an entire wall dramatically papered in glimmering gold leaf is offset by two large, monochrome artworks.
UP THE VOLUME
This three-storey apartment is enveloped in moody shades of grey, layered with beautifully tactile materials such as the double-volume tempered steel plates that form one wall of the bedroom space seen here. Light floods in during the day, and the interior designer says she was “cognisant of how the interior relates to the exterior, so I opted to stand the dark in opposition to the brightness of the outdoors”. The resulting spaces are bold, simple and masculine – while also very elegant.
INSIDE OUT
When designing a new home for himself and his family, an architect turned to the archetype of the internal courtyard wrapped around on all sides by the house. As the master bedroom suite seen here shows, the house is a series of pavilions with vast sliding doors and screens that can be opened and closed to reconfigure its spaces, while the merging of indoors and out is facilitated by a series of secondary courtyards where the pavilions open onto private, peaceful nooks under the trees.
JUNGLE FEVER
In a small apartment, the confident use of oversized elements – whether these are finishes or furniture pieces – creates a feeling of luxury and generosity that makes the rooms seem much larger than they are and elevates the whole atmosphere into something intrinsically richer than what might have been expected. A bold, jungle-print linen wallpaper in the bedroom adds a feeling of wild, nature-inspired glamour.
FLORAL KINGDOM
“A room is never complete. It’s a process,” says the owner of this modern farmhouse on the outskirts of a big city. “As you live in it, you get a better sense of what it needs, and I add layers until I have a space that feels like part of the family,” she adds. It’s clear she’s had a great deal of fun conceiving a unique boudoir for her eldest daughter, with the result being a bedroom that combines fabulous wallpaper with a whimsical French rattan bed and plenty of quirky details.
BACK TO BLACK
In a reworked mid-century house, restored modernist items picked up on auction rub shoulders with contemporary pieces, setting up an easy-going dialogue between past and present. The homeowner, a contemporary art dealer and sometimes gallerist, has also turned almost every room into a powerful display space – as seen here in the master bedroom, where a pair of eye-catching artworks give spectacular views an attractive counterpoint.
