Dorm design dilemma

Kim wrote us hoping we could help her with a design dilemma: "I am a uni student living on campus. My uni room is quite large and easily fits a king sized bed, a bar fridge, a bedside table and two tables. I am looking for an ethnic and minimal look (if that even exists). The walls are the real ugly dorm room walls. I have tried covering two of them up with pictures but am left with one really large blank wall. Any more pictures will definitively defeat the minimal look I'm going for. Any suggestions?? The room currently has a burgundy Thai bedspread with silk cushions, Turkish carpet and a Moroccan inspired lantern. Any help is appreciated!!"

Kim - your room sounds gorgeous so far! I have a couple of suggestions for you - an ornate wood mirror, carved wooden panels, a fab piece of fabric simply tacked up, or a big (but flat) tropical plant. Below are some photos of ethnic bedrooms and a couple living rooms for inspiration. We'd love to see photos of the room once completed!

Gaelle Le Boulicaut	Gaelle Le Boulicaut
PointClickHome	indigo design
Selina Lake	Canadian House and Home
Muriel Brandolini	Heather Cameron
Gaelle Le Boulicaut	House of Pictures
Living at Home	Domino
Johnny Bouchier	Marie Claire Maison

Sacrifices

HGTV

Daphne wrote us with an interesting and common problem: "So, I have a happy dilemma, but a dilemma nonetheless. The BF and I are taking the plunge, and he's in the process of moving in with me now. He's pretty content to let me handle the decor, but I want him to feel like he lives here, too. So ... rock posters? I need to see some inspiring photos of ways to keep a bedroom looking sophisticated and elegant with rock poster. Yikes. So far, I am thinking of painting room light gray and framing the posters with carved wood frames painted glossy black. Maybe it will be dramatic. Any ideas?"

For starters your idea is a good one. But I love grey walls and anything in a glossy black frame. Maybe these rock posters you have to deal with aren't as bad as some of us may be imagining. But based on the fact that we don't know what they look like, I have a couple of ideas and a bunch of photos that might help. I don't think you can go wrong painting the walls dark, which would go with the hard edge of a rock poster, or you can glam it up using flocked wallpaper. If you don't want to go dark, then just funk up the room with fun colours and textures, and make it a quirky, eclectic space where you'd expect the unexpected (like a rock poster...in a bedroom). A thin black frame is classic and would work as well as a wooden glossy black one too, or if the posters turn out to have some good colours you can use as accents in the room, maybe thin coloured frames, like yellow or red. P.S. I could only find one photo with a rock poster featured. :)

Kenneth Brown	Style at Home
Elle Decoration	Peter Rüssman
Alison Spear	Wayne Vincent
Jeff Andrews	Ngoc Minh Ngo
Greg Natale	House to Home

Lerche Design

DC Design House bedroom

Brocky Proxmire wrote us about the bedroom his mother, interior designer Kelley Proxmire, designed for the DC Design House. It's stunning, so elegant and sophisticated, and had a special feature: "The big hit of the room was the now you watch it (#7) now you don't (#8) TV. The TV is mounted on a swing arm behind the drapery panels. There is a slit in the drapery panel on the end so that swing arm may be extended several inches into the room. The size of TV (19") is correct size for this distance of TV viewing from the bed." Brilliant! Thanks Brocky (and Kelley!)

Design dilemma

Tessa wrote us with a design dilemma hoping we could offer some help: "I am writing to you now with a problem of my own. We live in a beautiful 19th century mansion in Washington, DC. It is gorgeous and wonderful, but we rent it and are not allowed to paint any of the rooms. I am about to move into a different bedroom that is gorgeous, but painted one of my least favorite colors- burgundy. I hate burgundy! I tend to lean toward super bright hues (oranges, yellows, apple greens, etc.) when I decorate, and I am wondering (and hoping) that you guys might have some suggestions of what could possibly look good with this awful dark mess. Anything I have tried makes the room look like either a men’s smoking lounge or a cheesy Victorian salon. I haven’t seen you post many pics of burgundy rooms, so I thought you might have some cool ones hiding somewhere. Please help me out."

I went through my photo stash and just as I suspected, no one paints a bedroom burgundy. :) And I hate burgundy too!!! First, here are a few bedrooms that have dark walls (a couple burgundy-ish) that might inspire you to work with what you've got.

Nicholas Haslam

House to Home

Target Living

Domino

James Merrell

Living Etc.

Robyn Glaser

For alternatives, if you're allowed to put holes in the walls, maybe you should consider finding some not-too-sheer sheers and hanging them from those wire systems (Ikea I think has it) around the room (if it's not too big). Also, how about painting some really large pieces of foam core (if you can paint that stuff)/thin MDF and leaning it behind your bed, dressers etc. to hide as much of the burgundy as you can, or you can make a screen, like the one below.

Domino

And the following photo I thought was very inspiring and SO gorgeous. Now the walls are not burgundy, but imagine they were, and maybe the light shade of bluey-green that are used in the large upholstered pieces were a light pink. Sounds crazy but it could work to tone down the darkness, as they do in this photo.

Nicholas Haslam

Flickr finds - vintage bedrooms

honeypieLiving	nestdecorating
Lauren-Go-Lightly	freckledfarm
mollshot	icklemissus
swanketyswank	Blossomhillcottons
Feed Dog	house dreams
hownowdesign	icklemissus
melodyappel	nestdecorating
paper pony	This Little Piglet