How We Turned The 'Cold' Room into The Gold Room!

I think that most houses have one...that room that just never quite makes it when the rest of the house is being updated or renovated...the one that becomes a storage room and gets slowly filled with junk, the place that is really easy to just hide or dump things that don't really have another home yet, that you hope will be sorted just as soon as you have time.

Well, this was ours, but I promised myself that before Lily was born we would sort it. My crazy pregnancy nesting hormones targeted the 'Cold' room (as it was called then as it both looked and felt pretty cold!) and poor Patrick was hounded almost every time he sat down from finishing a nursery-related chore, to go and start to assemble furniture in there. You see by this point in the pregnancy it was too late for me to do much at all, except waddle and give orders!

And so over one weekend the unwelcoming Cold room became the Gold room! We mainly used items that we already had - the curtains, made from my favourite Christopher Farr fabric, Carnival (look out for a bespoke LBM design colourway coming soon in our next project!), had been made and hung almost as soon as we moved into the house in December 2016. I just love this fabric, for me it totally combines classic with modern, making it a great choice for most homes. It also added some much-needed colour to the space, which has walls painted in All White by Farrow & Ball (it backs onto the woods and so doesn't get much natural light except in the mornings) and natural sisal flooring from Crucial Trading.

Our budget to finish the room was pretty low, as most had gone on the nursery and with maternity leave coming up we couldn't afford to go crazy, so I focussed mainly on good value companies such as Swoon and Made.com for pieces of furniture. I fell in love with the bedside tables when I first spotted them a few years ago and the Sherborne chair just had to be included, especially as we live fairly close to Sherborne! The bed was an old one that we had already from Sofa.com, but Made.com have a similar one here. I wanted wall lights to help add atmosphere to the room but also included these super cute and useful touch lamps from John Lewis and Partners, as they make really good reading lights at bedtime.

Because the walls are white and the general backdrop to the room is quite calming and minimal, for the bedding I chose something with some texture. The ones in the picture are from Zara Home, but they are no longer in stock. I found these on West Elm when browsing for something cosy with texture and am now obsessed and have added them to my Christmas list (post coming soon!).

For the artwork, I chose three simple pencil drawing posters from Desenio and you can also get similar ones here on Etsy, which are two of my favourite websites for affordable art prints.

I wanted to keep a brass/gold theme throughout, as it's my colour of choice always when it comes to metals - I found this chest of drawers from Sweetpea and Willow (no longer available), but there is a similar mirrored option here from M&S (which we actually have as our bedside tables in the master bedroom). Plus you can never go wrong with a large round mirror - I love this one from West Elm and it comes in two sizes - we also have it in our front hall in the extra large size and we get so many compliments on it :) And finally, I chose the brass floor lamp from Made.com because both stylish and is good value.

For accessories we chose a few key bits to dress the room; a hanging rail from Cox & Cox instead of a full wardrobe - this is a great space/money-saving tip for guest rooms as people only tend to travel with a few bits that need hanging and I always like to include plants in bedrooms - we chose this planter from La Redoute, which is no longer available, but they do have a similar one here.

Other things I always love to include to make guests feel at home are a soft, fluffy bathrobe, candles and/or fragrance diffusers and a few cute books, the kind that you usually don't have time to read at home.

I really hope you like this room as much as we do - it's a lovely, calming space to spend time in and looks a million times better than it did when it was the 'Cold' Room!

Laura x