The Working Bedroom

By Dody Haris

Solutions such as hiding the bed come to the fore when the bedroom is also to be used as a work or study space – as in increasingly often the case today. If you intend to utilize your bedroom for work as well as for leasure, it is important to note precisely the use you intend to make of it, and the equipment and tools you will want to keep there. Will the secondary life of your bedroom be practical – for activities such as ironing, dressmaking or sewing? Or will it be a place for office work, involving tiles, papers, computers and other technical equipment? Whatever its secondary use (and remember, it is secondary), do not forget that it must be possible easily to hide from sleeping view the physical remnants of the day’s work. It is not helpful to see around you, last thing at night and first thing in the morning, invasive reminders of a less relaxing life, so work out a comprehensive storage scheme before you start planning – whether highly organized, made – to measure variety or more improvised option of a floor length cloth draved over a table.

This is of course is another area in which the mezzanine, raised platform, or galley can come into its own. Constructed to hold the bed in spacious comfort, a mezzanine platform provides an area beneath it in which another domestic life – of whatever description – can take place. The whole space can, and probably should, be decorated in a way that clearly defines the different between the activities of night and day.