Guest Bedroom with Solid Wood Bed and Wall Art

Most walls are kept a plain cream, with one room carrying a soft patterned wallpaper behind the bed. Plain paint was the safe call for guest rooms, since it suits any visitor and is quick to touch up. A single metal wall art piece sits above the pillows to give the wall a focus without committing to a heavy headboard. Keeping the backdrop calm means the bedding and rug can carry any colour you want to add later.

One of the rooms has a wall dresser with a mirror and a small stool, which gives a guest a spot to set their things and get ready. Building it against the wall rather than using a free-standing dresser saves floor in a room that is not huge. The mirror also bounces daylight back into the space. In the simpler rooms this drops to a bedside table only, so storage there is lighter and leans on the wardrobe outside.

Roller blinds cover the windows in most of the rooms, pulled down in a single sheet rather than gathered like curtains. Blinds were chosen because they take almost no wall space and are easy for a guest to work without knowing the room. They cut glare and give privacy at night. The lighter cloth still lets a soft daytime glow through, so the room is not black when the blind is down during the day.

The floor is a large cream tile with a patterned rug laid at the foot or side of the bed. Tile was the practical base for a guest room because it takes traffic and cleans in seconds. The rug is there to warm the first step out of bed and to add the pattern the plain walls skip. Being a loose rug, it can be lifted and washed or swapped, which suits a room used by many different people.

Each room runs a wall-mounted split AC, set high on the wall away from the bed so the draught does not blow straight onto a sleeper. A split was the right call for a guest room because it cools one room on demand without running the whole house. The units are quiet enough for night use. Being wall-mounted, they also leave the window free and the floor clear, which matters in the smaller of these rooms.

Yes, it is built to. The core is a solid wood bed, a bedside table and one wall of art, all of which fit a small room easily. Drop the dresser to a slim wall-mounted shelf if space is tight, and keep the roller blind since it needs no swing room. A lighter rug suits a small floor better than a large one. The whole look is deliberately simple, so shrinking it loses very little of the feel.

A guest room like this is one of the cheaper rooms to fit out, which is the point. Most of the spend is the solid wood bed and, where it exists, the wall dresser. Plain paint, roller blinds and a loose rug are all modest lines. There is little heavy joinery, so labour stays low compared with a master bedroom. Spend rises only if you add built-in wardrobes or wallpaper to every wall, so it is easy to keep this one lean.