See How a Stager Used a Canopy Bed to Make This Small Bedroom Look 2x as Big
Decorating and designing small bedrooms can come with a slew of seemingly contradictory advice: Paint it a light color, or go dark. Make your bed the focal point of the room, or shove it up against a wall to maximize floor space. Ana Cvetkovic, the interior designer and stager behind Rowhome Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had yet another counterintuitive trick for a compact bedroom she was tasked with decorating.
She knew the rental bedroom room needed to stand out.
“This project was a hybrid between staging and interior design,” Cvetkovic recalls. “The owners rent out this room in their home, mostly to medical students and traveling medical professionals who come through the city. They wanted it to stand out among the other rentals on the platforms they were using.”
In addition to having the interior design stand out online, the home stager wanted to make sure that the space would be comfortable and functional for the homeowners’ target tenant.
She used a canopy bed to make the space seem bigger.
The small and dark room is a tight space, and in order to make it look bigger, Cvetkovic decided on a generous canopy bed — even though filling the space with a large piece of furniture seems like it would go against their intended goal.
“It’s counterintuitive,” the stager explains. “When you have a small space, people tend to put lots of little things inside and it emphasizes just how small it is. But when you have something oversized in a small space, it’s almost like ‘Oh I wouldn’t expect that to fit in there!’ but it does, so it makes the space seem bigger.”
She used a full-size bed.
The canopy bed also adds visual interest in its height, which brings the eye up and fills the room without sacrificing square footage. Because a queen would have been tight for such a small room, the stager opted for a full size. She also painted, added crown moulding, and sourced the vintage dresser and nightstands from Jinxed, one of her favorite secondhand shops in Philly. The vintage pennants hung from the canopy bed were found at a local market.
She scoured secondhand markets.
“It was important to have a desk,” Cvetkovic says. “Medical students and professionals need a place to study, so I got the slimmest possible desk that I could find.” The desk, which was an IKEA piece found on Facebook Marketplace, allows tenants to use the space practically without sacrificing too much floor space in such a tight room.
The stager’s work paid off for her clients, as the room has been booked solid during the peak seasons for their clientele. “They told me that their tenants are drawn to the room,” she says. “On these platforms, there are so many things that are generic and boring. It’s the design that attracts their tenants to choose this room over others.”
After Cvetkovic finished decorating the room, her clients looked online and saw that other comparable rooms were asking more, even though they didn’t have the same attractive interior design that their room had. They decided to increase their price to better match competitors’ prices. “Good design equals more money,” the stager says.