Master Bedroom, Pottery Barn Linens, Just Not a Messy Bed

I’ve been sort of delaying getting the master bedroom revealed on this blog. Mostly because I’ve really been struggling with making the pictures look as good as the room looks in real life. For some reason, I can’t get a good angle with the bed, either it looks huge, or it looks messy. And then this week I got the Pottery Barn catalogue in the mail and the bedroom pic, that by the way, looked great… of course, had bed linens that were slightly messy.

Source: Pottery Barn

Doesn’t that bed above from Pottery Barn look great? Yeah, I tried to embrace the ‘messy’ bed look. I wasn’t happy with that picture either. And the toile printed linens I have, even came from Pottery Barn. (maybe I just lack the guts to pull that messy look off, Ha! after all, what if you thought that since I posted pics of my bed messy, you thought that was how I normally kept it? Gasp!) 

So instead I tried to get the same angle and closeness of the bed as Pottery Barn did…

Well, it’s sort of like Pottery Barn’s pic, and even though I wasn’t going for the ‘messy’ bed, with the duvet cover being linen, it always has a slightly messy look.  

Here’s the same pic with more distance. I just wasn’t able to really capture the beauty of this room on the camera. Part of that may be because the view out the window is the gorgeous river scene that you just can’t see in this picture, but when you’re in the room, it’s a big part of the feel of this space. 

Well, with good pics or not, I’m still going ahead with giving you a few details of this space… and will continually be working on my photography skills… 

When we first bought ‘Our House’ the master bedroom and bathroom were very plain, and the master bedroom was much smaller. We waited for a long time, (actually 15 years), before we finally renovated this space, but now that it’s done, it’s so wonderful. And now we’re talking about selling ‘Our House’… I guess the next owners can enjoy our labors. 

Just to give you an idea of how the space used to be, here’s the room, or what you can see of it on the day we moved in 16 years ago:

(you can see out the back window in this picture)

The master bedroom originally, as shown in this picture, was a basic rectangle about 12’ x 14’ and had a private adjoining bathroom, with a walk-in closet beyond that. The trim was a plain ranch style trim with a dark walnut stain… very plain. 

Since there are 2 bedrooms on the lower level, and another room on this main floor that we use as a library, but could be easily be transformed to another bedroom, we decided to take advantage of the bedroom that was directly across the hall from the master to incorporate into the master suite space. (I’ll feature details on that transformation in a different post) 

So we tore down some walls, and rebuilt others, to create a larger bedroom space, and to create a large walk-in closet/dressing room, (the old walk-in closet originally was on the other end of the bathroom, but when we renovated the bathroom, we used that space for a huge walk-in shower!) 

I love having the master bedroom tied visually to the master bathroom, so in the master bathroom, we did the exact same wall and ceiling treatment and paint colors as we did in the bedroom. 

During this renovation, in the master bathroom, when we built the wall dividing the clawfoot tub from the 2^nd vanity, we installed an antique window to add character and allow light in (here’s a quick pic of the window in the bathroom)

In the bedroom, I repeated that decorating detail, with a different antique window, but the same idea.

This antique window we put in the new wall we built dividing the bedroom from the new walk-in closet/dressing room. (Originally, this space would have been in the bedroom across the hall from the master bedroom, but we incorporated that hallway space and part of the bedroom into our master bedroom space enlarging it, and with the rest of that other bedroom space, we used as the walk in closet/dressing room, now connected to our bedroom) 

Both of the antique windows I found on ebay. I’ve found a couple of ebay stores that offer very reasonable antique stained glass windows. Compared to local antique stores, the ones on ebay, with shipping, were still way more reasonable! 

I still have a lot more to share with you about the master bedroom, but for now I’ll end with another angle of the bed, looking toward the large window I featured earlier explaining how I accomplished form and function with the window treatments. In that post I showed you a current pic of the river taken in January in the morning.

Here’s another picture of that ever changing scene… this was taken last fall with most of the leaves off, but still some color.

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