A Bright and Bold Basement Bedroom

At this stage of life, I don’t have a lot of time for other projects aside from my own home, but when my sister asked for some design assistance after moving to her new place I was eager to help. She is renting, but her landlord was okay with her painting if she was willing to pay for the paint. She wanted to make the place her own so she was fine with putting in a little sweat equity. The bedding she had already was in a monochromatic palette, but she wanted my help in choosing a color for a feature wall. I helped her narrow down some paint samples and style her art.

Here is her room when she moved in.

And here it is now. I sure love a green wall! The shade of green we ended up going with is “Vine leaf” by Behr.

This project was a bit different, as I was only involved from a distance for most of it. My sister is a handy DIYer and so she did the painting herself. We wanted to bring some color into the space but since there is only one tiny window and the overhead light isn’t that great we opted to just add a feature wall of color and then kept the other walls light and bright. She already had the larger art pieces and I just helped with the placement and styling of them.

My formula for styling shelves is to group things in odd numbers and then, have something vertical to bring your eye up, then something horizontal to ground the vignette, and lastly, a sculptural or organic piece to balance it all. I used the art she had and then added some books, plants and sculptural objects to balance the overall look.

For lighting, we went with a hanging pendant from IKEA to save space beside the bed. It’s the perfect ambiance to read books beside in the evening.

This was a fun project. I love overhauling spaces but it’s also nice to just do a little bit of the fun styling and have someone else do all the heavy lifting. 🙂

My sister is a cat mom and I couldn’t resist getting a couple of shots of her and one of her cats “Tofu” in the space after we finished our styling, so I’ll leave you with some shots of her pretty kitty! She was very into the photoshoot! 🙂