Bedroom Design Fundamentals

Explore slow home principles for bedroom design focusing on daylight, storage, bed placement, and circulation for a functional, comfortable space.

Key Takeaways

Good daylight and window placement are crucial for bedroom comfort and design.
Closet design impacts room shape and furniture arrangement significantly.
Logical bed placement enhances room functionality and circulation.
Single entry to bedroom suites improves privacy and space efficiency.
Slow home principles promote sustainable and well-thought-out bedroom design.

What the video covers

Introduction to slow home principles applied to bedroom design as part of a 12-step slow home series.
Key bedroom design elements include good daylight, sufficient storage, logical bed placement, and adequate circulation space.
Importance of window placement: bedrooms facing front or backyard allow large windows and good views, unlike sideyard-facing rooms limited by fire codes.
Case study of a narrow lot house demonstrating large backyard-facing windows for both master and secondary bedrooms.
Avoiding closets that protrude into the room to maintain a rectangular, easy-to-furnish bedroom shape.
Master bedroom design features a king bed centered naturally due to corner window placement, with balanced circulation and furniture arrangement.
Principle of a single entry to the master bedroom and bathroom suite to improve convenience, reduce doors, and increase usable wall space.
Preview of next episode focusing on detailed bedroom design elements.
Promotion of the book 'What's Wrong with This House?' as a resource for slow home design principles.

Chapters

Why is window placement important in bedroom design according to Slow Home principles?

Window placement affects daylight quality and views. Bedrooms facing front or backyard can have large windows for better light and views, while sideyard-facing windows are limited by fire codes and proximity to neighboring houses.

What is the recommended approach to closet design in bedrooms?

Closets should be embedded into the architecture rather than protruding into the room, which helps maintain a rectangular room shape that is easier to furnish and more functional.

Why is a single entry to the master bedroom and bathroom suite preferred?

A single entry improves convenience by allowing someone to get ready without disturbing others sleeping, reduces the number of doors, and increases available wall space for furniture and beds.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Welcome to Slow Home Studio. Too many people live in badly designed houses, and we want to change that. February is bedroom month, and this is week three, and we're going to be looking at the slow home principles behind good bedroom design.

Speaker A

Yeah. And the slow home principle for bedrooms is one of our 12 steps to a slow home and number nine.

Speaker A

And the principle reads that all bedrooms in a slow home have good daylight, sufficient storage, a logical place for the bed, which we will talk about in a little bit because that's really important, and enough room for circulation. Before we get to the

Speaker A

logical place for the bed, I want to talk about the first one, good daylight, because that's not something that we really need to draw, but it is a really important principle. You want to have a well-sized window, and you want to have a

Speaker A

bedroom that doesn't face a sideyard. If you've got a room that faces the front or the backyard, then it can really have a large window, and it will have a good view. If you've got a sideyard window, you're restricted from a fire code point

Speaker A

of view to having a very small window, and you're going to be looking at another house about 8 ft away if you're in an urban situation.

Speaker A

Yeah. And to demonstrate these principles, we thought we would look at the floor plan of our case study house in detail and look at not only the master bedroom, but the secondary bedrooms because there's some really important design considerations.

Speaker A

This is a narrow lot house. Okay? So, typically in narrow lot houses, a lot of times the secondary bedrooms, at least one of them, is in a sideyard. But the way we've detailed this, both bedrooms have large windows which face into the

Speaker A

backyard. And that's really, really important.

Speaker A

Yeah. And another thing that this house doesn't have is it doesn't have one of those closets that come out here into the house, which is one of my pet peeves. Your personal irritants because because look at the alternative. This is look at how simple this is and what a difference it makes to the room.

Speaker A

If you just embed the closet into the architecture, it just disappears. And what you get in as a result is a nice rectangularly shaped room that's easy to furnish.

Speaker A

Yeah. So, I want to also talk about the master bedroom a little bit and the details of that. Now, the master bedroom is slightly bigger than the other bedrooms, which makes sense as it should be, but not too big. Not too big.

Speaker A

We have a king bed, and this goes back to the idea of a logical place for the bed. This bed is centered in the room, and it has a natural place because of the corner window. It wants to be there.

Speaker A

We've built this asymmetrical headboard which comes to the end. There's enough room for a night table on either side.

Speaker A

Good circulation space, but then the proportion from the foot of the bed to this wall is enough to allow for this piece of furniture to fit properly and still have circulation between the edge of the furniture and the foot of the

Speaker A

bed. It's a good place for a television if that's your sort of thing in a bedroom. I do want to take a couple of minutes and talk about the master bathroom. I know that's not something that we really are going to talk about

Speaker A

this month. That's next month. But right now, let's just talk about that. And one of the principles that we try to do wherever possible, it's not always possible, is to have a single entry into that whole suite of rooms so that

Speaker A

someone can come in, they can get ready, they can get dressed, and then they can leave without having to traverse back and forth through that bedroom. It

Speaker A

not only is it more convenient if someone happens to be trying to sleep in the room while you're getting ready, it also reduces the number of doors by one so that it increases the wall area for furniture and beds. Good point. So, in the next episode, we're going to zoom in in more detail, and we're going to look

Speaker A

at some of the detail design elements in bedroom design. See you next week. If you're interested in learning more about the principles of slow home design, you can pick up a copy of our book entitled What's Wrong with This

Speaker A

House? It's a practical guide to finding a well-designed and sustainable home. It's available for sale on the Slow Home Studio website. It's also available for sale at amazon.com in both paperback and the Kindle format.

Topics:slow homebedroom designdaylightstorage solutionsbed placementcirculation spacenarrow lot housemaster bedroominterior designsustainable home

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