9 tips for decorating a small bedroom

Choose only what you use every day: the bed, the wardrobe and a surface beside the bed. Each extra piece adds visual information to the room and takes away floor. Prefer simple shapes and straight lines, which read quickly.

A small bedroom calls for proportionate pieces: a bed without a tall, wide headboard, narrow bedside tables, a shallow chest of drawers. Before choosing, check the size of each piece on the plan. When catalogue pieces do not line up with the walls, made-to-measure furniture uses every centimetre.

Light colours reflect more light, and a brighter bedroom looks larger. White, cream, beige or a light grey on the walls, and the same family of tones in the bed linen and curtains. With 2 or 3 tones, the room stays calm. To balance colours with each other, see the guide The 60-30-10 rule.

A mirror returns the light and extends the room. Placed opposite a window, or beside it, it reflects daylight into the rest of the room. It can be a floor mirror, a mirror above the chest of drawers or mirrored wardrobe doors.

Low furniture leaves more wall free above it, and the room looks taller. Furniture on legs leaves the floor visible underneath, and the room seems to have more area. The MUSE bedside table, for example, stands on 30.5 cm legs, and the box floats above the floor.

A bedroom where you move around without stepping round furniture looks bigger. Keep the sides of the bed you use, the foot of the bed and the front of the wardrobe clear. The measurements for each walkway are in the guide How to decorate a small bedroom.

If you want a television in the bedroom, mount it on the wall. It frees the unit that would have to hold it and the floor beneath. A wall panel hides the cables and keeps the wall tidy.

In a small bedroom, every surface counts. Wall and ceiling lights give light without taking up the bedside table or the floor. A wall light on each side of the bed is for reading, and a ceiling light is for tidying and cleaning.

The LINHO wall light, in natural alabaster, is 25 cm in diameter and projects only 8.5 cm from the wall. How to plan the light of the whole room, with the light points each room needs, is in the guide How to match lighting to each room.

Shelves and niches move storage onto the wall, where it takes up no floor. Above the bed, above the desk or beside the window, they hold books and objects and decorate at the same time. Niches built into the wall or the headboard sit flush and do not stand out.

For other ways to store, see the guide How to make the most of space by creating storage. And for the tricks that make any room look bigger, not only the bedroom, see the guide Small room, bigger home. A complete bedroom is on the Bedroom page.

More pieces in the Bedroom collection.