My Favourite Room in the House

Our bedroom is undeniably my favourite room in the house. It’s the full width of the house, and is blessed with high Victorian ceilings, original cornicing, a huge bay window and a smaller window to the side. Light, so much lovely light! It’s taken us a while to get it right in here though, for this room to reach its potential. When we moved in six years ago we had the most enormous wardrobes with black glass sliding doors (which I always hated!). We’d had them for years prior to living here and they’d provided much needed storage in a house with very little, and were a good solution in a bedroom where there wasn’t space to open wardrobe doors. Unfortunately though they created a wall of black which sort of had to be decorated around. What we ended up with was a room which was never quite finished and never really worked.

A little over a year ago I started using the room for newborn photoshoots. Occasionally people have a lot going on at home and prefer to come to me, and I have a lot of empty floor space in this room and of course all that lovely light. Having other people into my bedroom gave me the kick up the pants I needed to give the room a massive overhaul, so last summer that’s exactly what I did. I went for a very simple, predominantly white colour scheme, which optimises the natural light and lets the original details such as the fireplace and the cornicing do the talking. I painstakingly painted every inch of the room, floor, walls and ceilings (several times in fact) in a lovely fresh almost white colour. The curtains and the blind for the small window I made out of a natural linen with a butterfly detail. The white bed frame we already owned and was in the spare room and we swapped our chest of drawers with Max, took his simple white one and he got our Victorian pine one. The floors remained as they have always been, the original floor boards painted white. I have resisted the temptation to cover the walls in pictures and instead we have vintage mirrors scattered around, which bounce around the light and increase the sense of space even further. Oh and the dreaded wardrobes, we managed to condense these down to two thirds of the size, giving up one section each and we changed the doors to simple white ones.

Having completed most of the cosmetic details in the room, the essential elements of a bedroom got neglected. I’m rather embarrassed to say we had inherited our mattress from my Mother-in-law 15 years ago! We found it comfortable and always slept pretty well, so we honestly saw no reason to change it. However when Leesa UK offered to send me one of their mattresses to try, I jumped at the chance. Leesa began business in the US in 2013, and have now set up in the UK too, you can read more about their story here. They have completely redesigned the mattress from the inside out, and have produced a revolutionary memory foam design that they claim “helps almost everyone sleep better”. Leesa have simplicity at the forefront of everything they do, from their one “universal” mattress model, to their simple mail order system through their website. When the mattress arrives at your door, rather unbelievably, it is compressed and rolled into a cardboard box!

Unpacking the mattress is pretty good fun, once you rip open the plastic wrapper it immediately starts to inflate. Leave it to it’s own devices for an hour and it’s unrecognisable when you come back, and is as plump and firm as you would expect! I think many of us have preconceptions as I did, that if you want a really good mattress then you will want sprung. They are so much more expensive on the whole, and therefore you would assume better. Well I am completely in love with this mattress and will never go back to a sprung one. It’s totally smooth and lump free as there are no springs to manoeuvre around. I also think it bounces around far less (in fact barely at all) when the other person shifts and rolls over in the night. One of the things I personally love the most is that it seems to retain the warmth when you get up in the night. Our house is like an ice box at night and we don’t heat the bedrooms at all. I often still make trips to Max’s room in the middle of the night and one of the reasons I struggle to get back to sleep when I get back into bed is that the bed has gone cold while I’ve been gone. In fact the top “air flow” layer of the mattress is really very clever, as it will regulate your temperature and help to keep you cool on warm nights too.

Leesa are so committed to making this a simple decision for you that they even offer to give you 100 nights to try the mattress in your own home, and if then you then decide against it they will take it back with no hassle at all. Honestly, I’m delighted with it and we are both sleeping really well on it. It has really completed the room and it’s now a haven of light, peace and comfort. Ok… not always peace. There are one or two monkeys who enjoy jumping on the bed! Seriously though the family bed is a place of refuge for us all though, the kids come in at the weekends when they wake up, or during the night when they are ill. It’s a beautiful, light and airy space, there are always fresh flowers on the mantle piece, and my favourite thing to do is lie on the bed to chat to my Mum on the phone, read a book, or just think and enjoy the view. We actually spend a surprising amount of time in here, folding washing, ironing with the sash window flung open, and my husband and I chat in there whilst we are getting ready in the mornings. Often one will sit in the chair with a coffee whilst we catch up with each other’s news.

I also achieved my original objective of providing a room that will double up as a studio. The colour scheme means that it provides a neutral backdrop and I can keep snapping whilst parents sooth or feed their babies, without worrying about strong colours popping up in the background. Newborn shoots sometimes last several hours and now the room is a very pleasant place to while away the time with people. I almost considered turning the room into a dedicated photographic studio and moving us to the spare room, but honestly I’m not ready to give it up. I love too much the rare occasion when I can wake up, open the curtains and climb back into bed and enjoy my view across the park. Thanks to Leesa UK, my bed is a better place to be than ever before, and maybe, just maybe, a solitary cup of tea there will happen more often in the near future 🙂

Leesa are offering my readers an amazing discount – click here for more details!

This post was kindly sponsored by Leesa UK, all opinions are my own.

Hannah x