I’m a firm believer that few things in decoration are as exciting as making a home feel your own. And, compelling as it may seem, some spaces are, in my experience, trickier than others. When I started thinking about my bedroom after moving to a new place and going through a renovation, it quickly became clear that it wasn’t a single decision, but a whole accumulation of them. There were practical questions to resolve, of course, but also a long list of things I liked, wanted, dreamed of, or simply felt attached to. Where the light switches should be. Whether I wanted wall lights or table lamps by the bed. Brass or nickel. Then there were the more instinctive pulls: a wallpaper I loved, a fabric I kept coming back to, the idea of rush matting rather than bare floorboards.
None of these things felt contradictory on their own. The difficulty was keeping them in balance. Comfort, atmosphere, usefulness, familiarity. Wanting a room that felt easy to live with, but also recognisably mine. At a certain point, the question stopped being about individual choices and became something broader: how all of this could sit together without the space tipping into something generic or over-resolved. That was the moment when hotel rooms crept into my thinking, but not as an ideal to copy.
Hotel bedrooms are very good at removing friction. The light is where it should be. Nothing feels awkward. Everything has been anticipated. But how risky is all that? Where is the fine line between ease and comfort, and bland impersonality? I spoke to a few designers about this, and this is what I learnt.
‘To be honest, I quite like it when a bedroom feels like a hotel room,’ says Brandon Schubert. ‘Or maybe I should say I like hotels that feel like people’s houses, so there’s plenty of room for overlap.’ What hotel rooms offer is efficiency. ‘They’re usually professionally designed and well thought out. In a good hotel room, everything is right where you need it.’
The problem arises when efficiency is mistaken for neutrality. ‘When a client tells me that they want their bedroom to feel like a hotel, I don’t think that means that they want it to be impersonal,’ Brandon explains. ‘They want efficient and thoughtful design. But how we “skin” that room with our design can still be entirely personal to them.’
That personal dimension, Mary Graham argues, is about how we actually live in our bedroom. ‘Designing a bedroom at home is an incredibly personal process,’ she says. ‘It always begins with understanding someone’s real habits – do they read in bed, get up in the night, crave total calm or prefer to feel cocooned?’ Those rituals shape everything that follows.
Mary considers bedrooms ‘the most challenging room in a house to get right’ and stresses that the aim here is not perfection, but authenticity. ‘The task is to tease out a truly honest brief from a client – and often the answers surprise them as much as us.’
For Lonika Chande, meaningful objects play a central role in making a bedroom feel like one's own. ‘For me, it should be deeply personal in a way a hotel room just isn't. My mum has always kept my first shoes and ballet shoes lined up on her chest of drawers. Most homes have these things tucked away somewhere and giving them a spot in the bedroom brings such warmth.’
Books, too, bring a sense of intimacy to a bedroom. ‘A stack on a bedside table says so much about someone’s interests and habits, and it immediately softens the room.’ Textures have a similar role. ‘Anything with a bit of irregularity like linen, wool, or old embroideries helps the space feel lived-in,’ says Lonika, who also stresses the importance of considered lighting. ‘We always go for soft, low-level lighting, wall lights, and table lamps rather than anything overhead. It instantly makes the room feel cocooning and calm.’
That sense of calm, Tiffany Duggan suggests, is inseparable from patina and signs of use. ‘Typically, we Brits like interiors that feel as though they have evolved naturally over time,’ she says. ‘A touch of wear and tear can bring warmth and authenticity to a space.’ What she resists is the idea of fixing a bedroom to a specific look. ‘I don’t like a bedroom to feel like it’s a slave to any one era or style but prefer to choose the best bits from various periods in a considered and balanced way.’
In the end, a bedroom works not because it functions smoothly, but because it feels lived in.
