Colours and Rooms - 3 -Bedrooms

On goes the musing about colours and rooms. This time, I want to think about bedrooms and their colours. Question of tastes, as usual.

 It is amazing, how often people do not take the care they take in decorating their living room into their privacy area - which, after all is a very important one. It is like the person who does not care to put the butter on its proper dish when alone, but instead eats out of the package, to avoid "work".... I have seen installations for sleeping, which were little better than a dumping room or an additional attic, without any care for beauty or comfort. Again: a question of tastes???

The most important choice in colours is - in my humble opinion -  for a soft and cosy scheme. As always I advocate not more than two colours, with an additional third one for fun and lightness of touch. Naturally it depends also on the country you live in! A white and cool blue bedroom is wonderful in Greece, but can be terribly uncomfortable in grey Brussels and its rainy weather. Beautiful but a little bit daring is the soft powdery brigade of old roses and some grey - with white bedsheets a truly unbeatable combination. Or warm green and a lovely Toile de Jouy. Or simple white and grey, with a touch of soft reds, or greens. I would strongly object to too intensive colours for a bedroom, it is not calming but too exhausting to wake up every day in a neon orange nightmare.

To make it even more cosy, why not put a nice carpet on the floor, preferably in a natural material and perhaps fluffy, to have the luxury of getting out of bed on a cold winter morning and not have your feet freeze immediately. Another great asset is a soft throw over your bed - which can double in a very cold nights as additional blanket. Preferably in a calm colour and soft material - a friend of mine has some fur on her bed and it looks stunning.

Another thing: I personally have never liked to have a bed directly put to the wall - it is cold and uncomfortable. As a child my mother used to hang nice cotton curtains on the walls next to our beds, which gave it always the feeling of additional cosiness.I still do it today.
Bedlinen is another thing - for me there is nothing other than white - crisp, lovely white. Best is still Egyptian cotton, the thread is fine and high. It always looks fresh, wonderful inviting and gets better the more you wash and use it. I have succumbed to coloured bedlinen in Ikea many a time, but then I have always regretted it - anyway, it was always for the children, because I myself hate multicoloured bedlinen. I much prefer having a crisp white duvet and putting a lovely wool wrap on top of if for the colour splash.

I remember vividly the wonderful feeling of simple crisp cotton sheets in the small Italian hotel in Grado, Italy, where I spent a couple of weeks with my parents in the 1970ies. It was so simple and yet so comfortable - a simple white room, no schnick-schnack, a simple metal bed, with a cushion, white sheets and a simple wool blanket, like a monks cell. Part of the fun was, for certain, my brother and me sneaking of to the roof terrace of the Pensione and playing between the white long bed sheets, which were hanging there to dry in the lovely June Italian summer.
Anyway, the idea of ironing should not keep you from using good stuff, because if you take a little care in how to hang it properly to dry, you just have to fold it firmly and it looks the part.

Another big No No is plastic and polyester stuff - please don´t. Ever. Not only is it not comfortable for sleeping -it is horrible sticky and gives you a rash, cooking in your own juice ... brr. Out with it, immediately!

In the end it is so simple. If you get the ideas, i.e. the ingredients right, than you do not have to work a lot for it - it goes alone and long way. I should write a post about breakfast in bed.... Always looking for that ideal tray for writing, having a cup of tea and a telephone on it...

Thoughts about a Bed

It is so important to have a good bed and a quiet place to sleep - it is the best and most natural way of recovering from a strenuous life, hectic and stress: if you sleep well and sound, you are a different person during the day, whether you sleep alone in your bed or in a crowded way.



Moons over Brussels

First of all I advocate enough space to sleep at ease. I always wonder, how  couples can survive on a bedwidth of 140 cm? When you get every move of the other person into your bones and worst of all, have to share ONE blanket... Maritial bloodbath guaranteed. So one of the first luxuries is to have some space for yourself and perhaps a blanket for yourself as well. I personnaly do not like any artificial stuff and whenever I can, choose good old wool or downs over the cheaper syntetic versions.  What leads us to the holy grail of bedlinnen - of course white is the answer and cotton as well. Basta.

A good mattress is always expensive but one of the best investments you are going to do in your life - just remember, you will spend a good part of the later in this bed! Essentials for me which make all the difference in a bedroom are light, air and quietness - so you can sleep with the window open. You do not need necessarily a big room -  even an alcove is perfect, if airy. It is lovely though if you have a view out of the window if you wake up. I KNOW. Luxury! Remember I am talking so often about being woken up in the early morning by busy birds greeting the new day? So much nicer than having the horrible shrillness of an alarm clock going off next to your poor old head. What a start in the day is this?

A bed is for recovery, security, fun and homeliness, but I do reject very strictly the unholy habit for watching television there - why should one fall happily asleep after having watched several murders and other terrifying things in the dark? No thank you. Definitively no TV in my bedroom. There might be some advantage of working with your laptop there or having a nice telephone conversation, snugly curled up in the eiderdown. If I am not wrong, Winston Churchill used to work every day in bed until midday. Just imagine the country governed by Mr. Churchill from his bed - and it was not to their very worst indeed. But I do confess that when young, I used to hear radio in my bed in the evenings - mostly classical music though. But if you live not alone and share a bedroom this is a pleasure you have to forsake. Only recently I have discovered the bliss of an ipod - heard some concerts on Musique 3 and loved it. Actually  I have asked the children for a smallish radio for this Christmas - and got it! A question of tastes, as I say...

On decision making

Well, here we are, in the NEW YEAR. How about your resolutions? The ever pending question... It seems, that resolutions are there to be broken. But I took only one for this year and will try to keep it faithfully going: taking decisions at the right time, in my time.

There is a saying attributed to Katherine Hepburn, another of my heroes in life:
"What the hell - it might be right, it might be wrong - just do not avoid!"

How right she is. How much time do we lose in our lives in not making decisions? It is a fine art to know the difference of simply not taking a decision because of consideration and decisiveness, or to let things simply happen and take no responsibility and not owning what your decisions are. After all it is your life - and you should take decision in your own little manicured hands? We have produced so many fears and buts and whens during the last 50 years, that decision making has become highly dangerous, or so it seems. If you do that, then a whole avalanche of negative things might happen. Or not.

Deciding what and who one is needs courage - courage to confront oneself in the mirror and recognising what is great about ourselves and what is definitely not so great. We have both in us and with the courage of taking decisions the good parts get stronger, because we define ourselves more and more and the world around us knows with whom to count on in situation which can be tricky.

I speak not of blind deciding ones fate, like getting engaged  after 2 weeks, or hanging on to a decision simply because it was made and the fear to get out of it is too big to admit. How often have we  hang on to dead decisions which make us not happy, nor will bring us or the people we live with some fruitfulness and happiness. So to speak.

Happy new year!