Real home makeover: a true blue bedroom

Feeling the blues…isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Find out how House and Home photographer Tia Borgsmidt turned her bland brown bedroom into a beautiful blue space - in a snap.

The Project: To inject a bland, lifeless bedroom with style and personality; to make use of space and the abundant natural light

The key challenges: The room lacked style and personality in every way, with a dull colour palette, a brown wooden floor (which darkened the room despite the large window). The bulky, space-eating furniture had to go, calling for a new storage solution.

a blue bedroom makeover with frames on the wall

The bedroom went from lacklustre to lively blue, transformed with a single wall of feature wallpaper and some dramatic floor paint. For a similar paint shade, try Corinthian Blue by Crown Paints. The Baby Dot Quilt and Colour Block bed linen are both by design firm Hay, available from Inreda in Dublin. The cushions are from Danish boutique Aymara.

Boring, impersonal and colourless aren’t the sorts of traits any photographer will comfortably live with for long. Once House and Home photographer Tia Borgsmidt had tired of her bland bedroom surrounds, big design decisions were taken in a snap.

blue bedroom - accents and accessories

The decorative number in the window blends with the bedroom’s blue scheme and was bought on a trip to Rome, while the box is from House Doctor: find similar version of both at Industry in Dublin 2, www.industrydesign.ie. The pale yellow vase is by Casalinga, and provides a nice colour contrast. Tia has mixed small pieces of art that she loves along with her family photos. The painting with the black circles is by Peter Christian Petersen, the line drawing is by Mette Helena Rasmussen and the rest Tia bought at a Christmas market.

“Our bedroom needed something wild, so I allowed myself to be totally different in redecorating it, because you normally have your eyes closed in that room! So you don’t tire of it as quickly,” says Tia. Tia began her modernisation by repainting the walls white, and removing all of the furniture except the bed and storage: the old built-in wardrobes were Tia’s favourite element in the room, and one of the reasons she fell in love with the house in the first place.

Some kinda blue

Tia loves the blue, so she chose it to become the room’s primary colour, with some white and yellow accents to add balance. “Blue is my favorite colour and when I lived in France as a young girl, the walls in my room was exact the same color. I think the colour has a calming effect, so it fits very well to a bedroom,” says Tia. The original idea was to paint the dark wooden floor white and the feature wall blue. But Tia went for the opposite effect, dousing the floors in the darkest of electric blues and whitewashing her old wardrobe. “By painting the floor blue the room gained a calm and pleasant atmosphere, and the colour highlights the white cupboards.”

blue patterned wallpaper

The wallpaper is Blue Baroque, a vintage paper (about €13 per roll at www.retrovilla.dk). Ferm Living makes the Feather wallpaper, a strikingly similar version, €67 per roll at www.fermliving.com. The table is by Muuto; the wall lamp is an AJ Arne Jacobsen lamp by Louis Poulsen, from €515 at www.light11.ie. The vase is from Designer Zoo.

Tia found a vintage wallpaper that perfectly matched her shade of blue, and fitted it to the feature wall behind the bed and has made a mini gallery of a bare wall, using pieces of art and family photos. “I think that every room should have a personal touch and photographs are particularly good at creating this,” says Tia.

Before the makeover, Tia spent little time in the room because she found it boring and it quickly became messy.

painted white wardrobes and a bright blue painted floor

The old white built in wardrobes that Tia finds both beautiful and practical stand beautifully to the blue floor.

“I didn’t just want a nice bedroom to sleep in, but also a room to spend time in,” Tia says. Now she uses her bedroom more than ever for reading and relaxing.

And her next project? “I dream of making a nice headboard out of an old door or panel painted white with a high gloss,” she says. Let us guess – in blue?

Fancy stealing Tia's style? Here's your essential sourcebook for suppliers and stockists.