Home Sweet Home

A master suite may not contain every one of the elements that make it measure up to a heart’s desire, but if one is on the first planning, he can have a good number of them. The sleeping area (starting point) should have an adjacent sitting corner and a home office and hobby corner, both boons to daily happiness.

Highly desirable are separate bath and separate dressing rooms with his and hers storage places for seasonal properties like bedding and bath linens.

If one has all these, then a private balcony or patio, screened or planted against the public eye, is the next step to private affluence. The coordinating factor for all is color and pattern.

Shelves for books, accessories, and TV, comfortable chairs with tables conveniently nearby, and reading light are all desirable features in a combination bedroom-sitting room. A fireplace further enhances the overall homelike atmosphere.

In the older home there is often one extra- large bedroom that can easily be turned into a master suite. Open up a door into the bath next to it, close up the hall door, and there’s a private bath. A divider separates space into living, sleeping, and dressing areas.

If there is room, floor-to-ceiling closets are a first consideration. They permit you to tear out old closets that make furniture arrangement difficult, to concentrate storage where most needed. And they hold all of the clothing and linens for dressing room and bath use. Louvered doors allow air circulation. In a bedroom of just average size, the addition of a lavatory is a daily luxury.

Furniture arrangement can play a part in giving you extra room. Place the bed or beds in a corner, rather than in the center of the wall, add a wall of built-in storage opposite them, use the available floor space for a sitting-room area.

Even the subtraction of one chest and the addition of one small table and a couple of chairs can change the character of the room, permit its use for morning coffee or for reading and writing letters. A wider than usual slipper chair, upholstered to blend with the bedspread, can be teamed with a small table and a hanging light fixture for leisure-hour meditating and reading.

If you want your bedroom-sitting room to have an air of spaciousness and still include all the items that are important to your comfort, ,shop for dual-purpose furnishings. A cabinet with a door that flips down rather than out and forms a desk top when you want it is a good selection. A combination desk and dressing table can also serve as an oversized nightstand between two beds.

Closets on either side of a wall can form a niche for a bed-and-table combination, can be installed with stock doors and moldings in the style of your choice, and can eliminate other existing closets to free floor space.

Consider building in the bed, with storage drawers beneath it, a storage headboard behind it. You need a sturdy frame of plywood, stock drawers you can buy from the lumber yard, and some handsome decorative drawer pulls that add a customized _look. Stain the bed or paint it to blend with the floor covering or the walls, or cover it in the bedspread fabric or wallpaper pattern to make a sensational focal point of decoration.

Furnishings with an open look—canebacked chairs, glass-topped tables, a filigree panel mounted on the wall for a headboard— these give the impression of space.

One large piece of furniture often gives the illusion of space where several small ones simply present a forest of legs, break up the look of continuity. There is another rule to follow here. If you do choose the one big piece of furniture, whether it is a headboard, or a combination of chests that fills a wall, or a desk-vanity-night table between two beds, then balance this mass across the room with another almost equal mass. It could be a solid wall of vivid color or tall built-in closets with louvered doors for texture, or shelving placed at irregular intervals along the wall, carrying an assortment of accessories or collectors’ pieces grouped to make the mass.

Light control is a governing factor in planning and executing bedroom-window treatments, especially for a bedroom that is planned to be used in several ways—as a study area, an extra sitting room for adults, a safe place to remain in a morning peignoir, or a private place for a home office-

Most people prefer a dark room in which to sleep; it takes little ingenuity to devise a treatment that keeps light out. Consider a lambrequin covered with fabric to match a laminated shade behind it. Blinds with overlapping slats can be adjusted to darkness or daytime lighting.

Your window treatments can set the color and style theme of the bedroom. Choose a fabric pattern that pleases you for your color coordination, then draw colors from it for the bedspread, the carpet or rugs, the upholstery for the sitting-area sofas and chairs. The stylist who designed the print was a professional who put the colors together knowingly, properly. For most pleasing results, select one plain color for major areas such as the floor covering and upholstery fabrics, another for walls, a third in more vivid tones for accessories. The bedspread can repeat one of these colors or repeat the drapery print.

In a formal bedroom-sitting room with elegantly traditional furniture, a formal but bold print is a good selection. It can be teamed with a smaller print for the wallpaper, if the colors are compatible. Shaped valances or swags are suitable trimmings. A country look comes with shirred tiebacks teamed with shades or cafés in casual prints.

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