Coastal Cottage: Design Plan for the bedroom

The time has finally come at the beach cottage where I get to start designing each space. It’s been so hard to not get ahead of myself during these early stages. With such little time to actually do the physical work, I’ve purposely not allowed myself to do a lot of design planning until I get a feel for what the new spaces will feel like.

The time has come for me to finalize the design plan for the downstairs bedroom and it honestly almost snuck up on me. With the bedroom ready for paint and built-ins, I knew I needed to get the plan ready because the plan is to keep the paint scheme the same throughout the first floor.

Today I’m excited to share with you the design plan for the bedroom

The first floor bedroom is quite small but because this will eventually be our guest room, we knew we needed it to function for us and for future guests.

When we finalized the floor plan a couple months ago we had to sacrifice the closet in the bedroom to fit a functional bathroom and laundry area and still have room for a wide, center hallway to access the backyard.

We weren’t overly worried about losing the closet because this won’t be our full time residence but we knew that we needed to create some kind of closet storage not just for our own storage but for future resale.

Given the size of the space, I came up with the plan to do built-in closets on either side of the bed along the outside wall. This will give us the storage we need without taking up too much space in this already tiny room.

To make the room comfortable to move around in, I decided the best solution would be to turn the bed sideways. We have been back and forth on whether to do a trundle or a queen bed between the built-ins.

I can argue for either option and honestly I think both choices would work for our needs now and in the future. Ultimately, we’ve decided on doing a queen bed that wont need to be opened up when in use. Below are a few examples of built ins around beds that have inspired our own solution.

Behind the bed will be building a slight bump out that will push the bed out into the room by a few inches. The top of this bump out will be capped with a natural wood shelf which will serve as the nightstand for the bed since there won’t be room on either side. The photos below, illustrate the idea.

The main part of the cottage will have shiplap on all walls but in this bedroom we decided to drywall and just do a shiplap feature wall inside the cabinets to highlight the bed. For such a small space, I didn’t want to have too much going on and I think tying in the shiplap will make this newer part of the house feel connected.

The walls and ceiling throughout the cottage will be the same, as will the trim. I honestly felt a little pressure to have to decide now but seeing it all come together in this room, I’m super excited!

Here’s the vision board for the bedroom.

(Sources are listed below)

The primary palette throughout the house is white and blue with accents of other colors like green, yellow and coral. To warm things up, I also plan to incorporate plenty of natural wood tones and a few touches of black because I think every room looks best with a little black.

The hardware on the barn door, and closets will bring in just enough black in this small room.

For this room, I kept things simple. White and muted blue/grays with pops of a coral/ orange. Nothing too beachy but I am absolutely in love with the whale art!

Crisp white bedding will keep the bed from feeling too heavy and create the perfect background for the pops of color.