- Re:Design
- Season 1
- Episode 2
Interior Designer Fixes 4 People's Bedrooms
Released on 03/28/2023
Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas,
where do we begin?
[paper tearing]
Hi, I'm Darren Jett and I'm an interior designer in New York
and I'm here to walk you through
how to redesign your bedroom.
[upbeat music]
Wow, okay.
These are all very real spaces.
I would say that consistently throughout,
there seems to be a few things.
One, there's quite a bit of clutter.
I would love to introduce some personality
into these spaces.
So this is Amy.
Amy is a New Yorker.
She likes collaging, art projects, going dancing, comedy.
She's a Pisces, but only cries at animal videos.
I'm really getting that in these two images right here.
Issues with her current setup,
the only space where her bed is in front of the window.
She wants a vanity and she cannot really get that
in her current setup.
She has a pretty small room, as you can see.
How do we get Amy to have everything
that she wants in this small space?
I have had a room like this for so long in New York.
I get it.
You walk into the room,
the door kind of opens up into the space
and suddenly you're in it.
It feels like a closet.
What I would tell Amy is to reorientate the bed.
Right now it takes up pretty much the whole room.
You walk in and you sort of have like a hallway that leads
to kind of nowhere.
If she were to take the bed and just reposition it
to be underneath the window,
she would have a lot more space
to have a table next to her bed.
We learned that the space
is actually a one bedroom apartment.
Take the door out, take it out.
I think that the door is actually not necessary,
it takes up so much floor area when it opens and closes.
By reorienting the bed and eliminating the door completely,
we don't have that issue whatsoever.
Amy needs drama.
She clearly loves the sort of maximalist vibe going on
and I really want her to push it.
I really feel like there's something inside of her
that is just dying to come out.
If Amy wants to go pink for this right here,
let's do the whole thing in that.
I'm talking pink curtains on all four walls,
covering up all the doors, covering up the window,
letting it sort of drape on either side.
You can still see in or still see out.
Functionally, whenever you add curtains,
whenever you add drapery,
whenever you add fabric in a bedroom,
it really just softens it up.
Your vanity is gonna act like your bedside table.
You're gonna have a lamp on it
and then we can have some floating shelves above
that come out.
She can have a beautiful stool.
Maybe it has some fringe on the edge.
Inside of her sort of bed cocoon,
I think what would be really cool
is putting the sconces on the wall with a cord behind
and it just sort of peeks out through the curtain
so she can have this be a whole zone for herself.
Okay, this, I love.
This I love for Amy, and again,
she has all of this pink happening up here.
So we go with something that's much more saturated.
This is kind of like a Gucci pink here,
maybe we do something like a Valentino pink right here
and we just kind of like do a little bit of a contrast
that would really pick up on all of the softness
that we're doing inside the bed zone.
I'm obsessed with this, Amy.
That is Amy's new upgraded canopy bed.
So this is Cynthia.
She's radiating personality here.
I really wanna like hang out with her.
More importantly, give her a space
that is a true reflection of who she is.
Her issues with her current setup.
She needs more storage.
She needs a full mirror, don't we all?
[paper tearing]
All right, what I want to do for her
is to just honestly reorientate the whole space.
First things first, what I would do
is to have a zone right here for all of her clothing.
I think Cynthia needs another rack for her clothes.
What we're gonna do then is disguise it all
behind a curtain.
That curtain's gonna run wall to wall.
It can be on a track that's mounted on top of the ceiling.
Then what we're gonna do, we're gonna reorientate her bed
to be underneath the beautiful window that she has.
What that allows us to do is to have plenty of space
on either side to have a bedside table with lamps
that she's currently lacking also.
Again, organize the room
and make it feel light, bright and cozy.
Then what we have between the foot of the bed
and this beautiful curtain right here,
plenty of floor space.
Now, she can easily have a place for a dresser here.
Perhaps it's a smaller one.
She can have a place for a bigger dresser here
underneath the window
and she can even then have plenty of space
for a big rug to join the two spaces together.
So what I would love to do
is to sort of have a color kind of like this right here.
With someone like Cynthia, it's really good
to think about designing around the things
that you already have
and then taking the elements of your personality
and just kind of pushing them out into the world.
Those are my quick tips for Cynthia.
Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas, where do we begin?
First off, it's a small room.
How do we make this more functional?
How do we make it just less of a mess?
How do we just give a little bit of personality in here too?
[paper tearing]
Attack the basics first
before we really get into the fun things.
All of these cords are, they're a nightmare, okay?
If you have a lamp that's on top of your dresser,
you just gotta tuck that cord behind the dresser.
You don't have to have 'em dangling out like this.
If you have a bedside table that's next to your bed,
why don't we have all of those cords come from behind it.
I think what I really want to do is create a focal point.
Why don't we try to do that with that wooden beam and column
in this arched window?
If the bed sort of goes in this direction instead,
every time you walk in, you see the bed,
you see the arched window, you see the wooden beam.
He only has room for one bedside table.
I get it, so do I.
But that's not a problem.
It can kind of tuck in behind this column here.
Maybe we go with something that's a bit more
of this older style wood,
something sort of reclaimed perhaps, could be kind of cool.
You know what?
I would actually do double duty.
Maybe his bedside table becomes his desk.
A small room, you have to think about multiple actions
for one object and we could do that with this moment here.
A little lamp for some reading access.
Maybe we could do something behind the bed
to kind of give a little bit of emphasis to the room.
Maybe we drape it
and create a sort of cool headboard moment.
You know what?
Why don't we hang up some of this art?
Why don't we put that on the wall
and maybe we make a focal point out of it.
Okay, that kind of gives a presence to that zone
which I really quite like.
He has a pretty nice dresser.
I think it makes sense to keep that.
But on top there's quiet a bit of stuff.
Simple idea, Nick.
Put everything in a basket.
Keep your life simple and organized, key to a small space.
Let's talk about the rug.
[paper tearing]
Your rug is too big, okay?
It hits the baseboard.
Let's figure this out.
I would say you do one thing,
you go almost wall to wall with a carpet.
You can do it in a solid color, and what it does,
it really makes the space feel one very, very soft
which is so important for a bedroom
and two, what it can do is to tie everything together.
Paint, paint the room.
I really like the idea
of picking up on the color of the beam.
Clearly he likes a sort of like bluish green
which you can see here.
So why don't we paint the whole room in a color
that sort of works along those lines.
I really like this kind of sagey green
that has just a a slight hint of blue to it.
That's my advice for Nick, sage advice
like his sage wall color.
So here we have Maya.
She is a mom of toddler twins.
She loves sleeping, watching Netflix
and in general chilling.
So I can completely relate to her.
Basically, our issue with the space
is that she says it's just really, really boring
and I think with the pandemic, she started working
from home and she uses the space as her office.
So she's trying to figure out
how to make the two work together.
The first thing that I noticed about the space
is that there's a lot of natural light.
So I'd like to think about how we can embrace that
and bring the natural light in.
[paper tearing]
Maya, like a lot of people in the past couple years,
has taken on the office into the home
and it looks like Maya is having her office in her bedroom.
You need more desk space.
Let's get you something that's a bit more gracious.
This is the floor plan.
She actually has a little nook, which is great.
I would say, let's get you something
that fills up that space as much as possible.
[paper tearing]
What she needs to do is to soften up the room.
Everything is very hard.
There's no curtains on the windows.
The bed itself is very, very harsh.
It just feels very rigid
and I don't think Maya is a very rigid person.
Think about a bed that has an upholstered frame
that goes all the way around.
Clearly, her room needs a sort of focal point.
She could hang curtains above this full wall right here.
That would come from the ceiling,
that would go behind her headboard
and it could also start to disguise this door
that's off center.
Maybe some sconces are on some wires
and you mount through the wall
and they can actually peek out through the curtain.
Maya has this kind of a AC unit on the wall,
they're never fun to work with.
What I would first suggest to her is to,
we can kind of build out a sort of box around that
to disguise it, paint it the same color as everything else.
Maybe we do some simple roller shades in the windows
that are soft, that just fill up the inside of the frame.
Maya says that she loves sleeping and watching Netflix.
I think I'd love to give her a space that,
when it's nighttime, she can easily just kind of be
in this sort of darker cocoon.
We could easily do something in a sort of,
maybe it's like a dark grayish blue,
almost like a slate color like this perhaps.
It would be like 50 bucks to paint it
and it would just give it a whole new life.
So if we're painting the room a sort of dark
sort of charcoaly blue, maybe we paint the dresser black
and it just kind of like fades away enough
but it just pops out and gives it a new life.
So that was Maya and we gave Maya a great place to relax.
My main two pieces of advice for your bedroom,
consider softness.
You want it to be completely soft inside
and you also want it to be very well lit.
A common misconception is that the bedroom
is a place that's forgotten about.
It's a place that only the person who lives there sees.
But I take that as something of a challenge, right?
It's a place to celebrate who the person really is.
It's a place to really bring about the personality
and sometimes it can be in a condensed space
but I say whenever you have a small space, go for it.
It's actually the time to maximize
what you're trying to achieve.
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