Colourful Victorian Master Bedroom Transformation

It’s time for another before and after. So I’ve got another before here with us and we are doing a bedroom.

This is an old Victorian home. With old Victorian homes we typically get these smaller bedrooms. So this really is more of a master bedroom. We want to be able to fit a king size bed in here. We’ve got a queen size in here already and so let me walk you through just some of the things in this space and some of the challenges that we had while designing this space.

Really, the size of the room is a challenge. Just a few things on this as well. I mean we have just an inexpensive paper, cellular shade on the window currently. It doesn’t offer great privacy or light control while you’re sleeping.

The other big challenge is this closet, which is pretty well useless. You can’t even hang a bar inside of it. It is so small and you could see these doors… See how narrow these doors are? It is so small and these little tiny doors that come out like little saloon doors were just totally not functional and not ideal for this space.

One other thing inside of this room, I mean I’ve seen people do this and I don’t understand why they do it, but the runners around the bed. I think people do it to make it easier to clean under the bed but to be honest, it’s a slipping hazard for one. But for two, having all of these gaps in between these runners is just not a look that is elevated and this is a really nice expensive custom home and we want to make sure that we were getting that elevated space inside of here and really bringing out some of the character and some of the history inside of this home.

So let’s see the design. So excited!

Here’s the layout of the room. You can see that they actually took the closet doors off that were about here and proposed to tear down the wall that was in front of it to create more of a nook so that you could actually store some clothes inside of this room. The way that the closet was set up before, it was basically like a little hallway with three little tiny shelves at the end of it that were popped in here. So you kind of walked into the closet, there was nothing that could be put on this whole floor surface here and there was just these little shelves across the back. So it was really not functional. You couldn’t really fit all that much in there and this allowed us to create a lot more storage and also reinforce the TV as well and a little accent room.

We were able to fit a king size bed by removing the tall cupboard that was here and that gave us a little bit more width. We didn’t need a whole lot more width to go between a king and a queen, and you can see we replaced those three weird runners that were around in the bed with one big nice area rug that sits nicely into the bed, at least a third of the way under the bed. Provides that warmth under your feet when you’re getting out of bed at night and also added a little bit more colour into this space.

The colours inside of this rug were really our jumping off point for the room. We have this rich green, it’s kind of a rich bluey green and inside of the rendering it’s probably coming out a little bit more hunter green than it will in real life, but this kind of bluey green in the middle of this persimmon colour along the edge and more of this wheat tone. We really pulled that out in some of the art and the bedding throughout the space.

So let’s take a look at more of a head on view here. You can see on either side of the bed this will actually be a beautiful tobacco coloured leather bed. It doesn’t show up really well in the rendering here, but it is going to be absolutely gorgeous and just a peak at the top here, we wallpapered the ceiling and that’s a great way to add a little bit of pattern, a little bit of interest and to highlight the really nice tall ceilings that are inside of this space.

You can see that we removed the cellular shade that didn’t really do anything in terms of light control and added instead these nice heavy draperies. It gives a little bit more weight to the room and use a mixture of super modern and antique art above the bed. That’s one of my favourite tricks is to mix super modern and antique in order to create a really curated feel and to create a more traditional vibe that’s still modern.

I always love to put up mirrors but there wasn’t really a good wall space to put a full length mirror that wouldn’t be intruded by the door being open so we did the full length mirror right behind the nightstands instead, which is one of my tricks that I love to do because it’s going to reflect the light from the lamps back into the room. When you’re standing back at the dresser drawer getting dressed, you’ll be able to see top to bottom from that full length mirror.

Over by the TV, we flanked that with a couple little lights to give this cove a nice warm glow. Otherwise this cove would probably be a little bit dark because the window in this room is quite small and there’s not a lot of natural light and just filled in this corner with a little plant.

On the bedding itself, going with a nice crisp white bedding, but then layering it up with some of the coloured pillows and bringing in our blues and our persimmon colours and our wheat colours inside of that bedding really helps to give it a more layered vibe. Helps it to feel a little bit less flat.

All in all, I really love this one. I think it’s moody. I think it is nice and traditional. It’s got a little bit of humour to it. It’s got a lot of modern elements to it. It has a lot of character elements to it, so it’s going to make sense in this home and really stand the test of time.

Because if we go too modern in a Victorian home in five years time, it’s going to be completely out of style and it’s not going to look right inside of that period of home. So we really wanted to honour the period of the home and give it that tradition while still updating it and honouring the modern aesthetic that we love working with today.