The Bedroom

A bedroom is really just a simple box. How hard can that be to design, you might ask. Well, it turns out that when designing the bedroom of a primary suite, it can be pretty darn hard. Here's the journey we took to arrive at our final bedroom design, from beginning to "approved permit" (YES! We have a permit!). There are quite a lot of fuzzy screenshots here, but I figured they were sufficient enough that you could get the idea.

First, after hearing our ask, the architect proposed three designs with different bed positions. I hadn't really thought about it before since we've always moved into a previously built home, but I suppose the bed position really is the key starting point to a bedroom. Especially when it's a king size bed, which ours will be (we are SO excited for that upgrade - soon there will be plenty of room for us AND the cats). So to orient yourself, the top of each picture is the back fence line of our yard (north-facing). The right faces out to our patio and the left to a currently empty lot that may one day be something more and which is the view of our house you get approaching up our street.

This look was nice, but we though having a wall with no windows on one of our more public walls might look weird architecturally:

This felt like some awkward wasted space in the entry way:

This one seemed ok, but that's a lot of windows looking out to a space that could end up being who-knows-what.

The verdict from that exercise was that we knew we wanted our bed to be against the wall that is depicted here on the left, facing out to our patio. Next, we considered storage and sitting space. We briefly toyed with some options that would create a picture window or pop-out. With a few different mock-ups (only one shown here), we quickly realized it would overcomplicate the design and really affect different exterior options. We also decided we want to have wardrobes in the room rather than a walk-in closet, something like the IKEA PAX system, but with the addition of some architectural accents and drywall to make them look fully built-in.

We also added in a couple windows back to the left wall. We felt these would be small enough to not be terrible if whatever ends up on the lot is something we don't want to look at, but still help the exterior look and provide a little light.

And that was the state of the room when we paused the project last spring, which gave us all summer to think more about it. After some discussions with some very design-savvy family, we came back to the project this fall with a new proposal that involved putting the bed on a partial wall with the PAX built-ins behind it. So the whole area behind the bed is essentially a really giant walk-in closet (though the cabinets will still have doors also). We started out with four full-size units like this:

But quickly realized that the partial wall had to line up with our entry door or it would look like you're walking into a wall, so that created a narrower corridor and the need to have thinner shelving on one side:

Then we played with adding a window or two back in, first one in the center:

And then one at each end, which we liked better because it would send some light into the main room as well. We also lengthened the entire room just a little bit to allow for enough space on the partial wall for normal-sized nightstands. Also during this process, we came up with a cool way to use some of the space to add another PAX unit immediately to the left of the entry. This will make more sense when I get to the "hyphen" post (the architects have been calling that corridor with the bathroom on it the "hyphen").

And...that's really it. We made an additional tweak once the detailed, more precise drawings came in, when we realized that a third full-size PAX unit would fit against the wall, and we figured out (at least tentatively/for the permitting and for the contractor bidding), where the electrical stuff would go. Here's the final drawing:

We really like how we will look out over the biggest part of our yard (and the space we're most in control of), how we have a wall of north-facing windows that should provide some lovely even light, and how we have a cool area of storage that is separate enough from the bedroom to give us a more open-feeling room. You can see from the parallel dotted lines where the highest part of our ceiling will be, which I think will also feel very spacious as it continues to rise past the bed. Having a floor-to-ceiling wall behind the bed that doesn't connect to any walls feels like a bold move that made me a little nervous, but now I'm already planning how to make that into a really cool accent wall, maybe even with a pop of wallpaper (though we don't even know what color we want the room painted, so that obviously has to come first!).