It’s time for a vacation to your favorite cottage. Whether you own a cottage or simply want to create a cottage look, you’re trying to find unique decorations and figure out how to design the bedrooms. Are you decorating a beach cottage? A forest retreat? Either way, you can use these Cottage Bedroom Ideas to create cozy, inviting, and thematic bedrooms for any cottage theme.
1) Pallet Bed
Cottages typically have a rustic look, whether they’re a beach cottage, mountain retreat, or any other cottage type. One great way to create a cottage look is to make your bed from pallets. This gives the impression of a room that was put together quickly for the night or a room in a rural cabin with scarce resources. The design is simple, with a mattress placed on pallets, and you can use a mattress that’s a little narrower than your pallets, so the pallets become your nightstands, too.
2) Nature
Part of the purpose of a cottage is to be close to nature. With that in mind, you’ll want your bedroom furniture and decorations to reflect nature. Try getting items like this lamp that looks like a tree with birds sitting in it. The white color will match many beach and country cottage interiors, while the tree and birds design will add elements of nature to the room. This fixture works well as a nightstand lamp or primary light source because many cottages won’t have overhead lights.
3) DIY Murphy Bed
If you’re furnishing a small cottage bedroom, and have limited space to work with, you’ll need some space-saving bedroom ideas. Luckily, if it’s a vacation cottage, you don’t need a lot besides a bed and dresser. Since the bed will take up the most space in a typical bedroom, try turning it into a Murphy bed using the instructions in this video by Justin Built. A Murphy bed is a bed that folds into the wall so that it only takes up space while you’re using it, leaving space for other activities in the rest of the room.
4) Table Lamps
In the past, many people built cottages without electricity or with only a couple of outlets, but no overhead lighting. If you want an old-fashioned, rustic feel for your cottage bedroom, you’ll want to use table lamps for lighting. Try using cottage-style lamps like this one from Amazon, and place them on smaller tables around the room, or place one on the nightstand and one on the desk to light any section of the room.
5) DIY Loft Bed
If you have a beach cottage or beach cottage style, you want a light and airy look. Even mountain cottages should have a unique feel that comes from atypical furniture choices. Try building a loft bed for your cottage bedroom. This way, you have space to store things underneath the bedframe, rather than wasting the area above the furniture. Having furniture higher up gives a lighter feeling to the room, too. You can use these instructions from Ana White to build the loft bed.
6) DIY Ocean View Shadowbox
If you have a beach cottage, you want some beach-themed items in the bedroom. Instead of paying a lot of money for novelty beach items, try crafting them. After all, you’re close to the beach, and probably have access to all the beach-theme materials you need for your decorations. Use the instructions in this article by The Southern Couture to make an ocean view shadowbox, so you can see the ocean even if it’s not visible from your bedroom windows.
7) Battery-Powered
If your bedroom is in a very old or remote cottage, you might have no electricity, or you might have limited access to it. Having battery-powered lights is always a good idea, particularly in remote areas that could have power outages. Try getting a decorative battery-powered lamp like this one from Amazon. It can be an everyday light, so you don’t have to worry about tripping over a lamp cord, or you can use it during emergencies, or to walk down an unfamiliar hallway to use the bathroom at night.
8) DIY Bits of Local Nature
If your cottage is near the beach, you’ve probably collected your share of seashells and other flotsam, but might not have found a use for it yet. You can turn seashells into decorations using the instructions from this article by Courtney with Crafts by Courtney, or use similar methods to turn other things into decorations for your bedroom. You can even collect bits of nature around a forest or mountain cottage to create locally-made, thematic decorations.
9) Retro
If you’d like your room to look like part of a vintage cottage, whether or not you have modern upgrades like electricity and television, you’ll want retro decor. While you can search for vintage decor, it can be expensive and take a long time to find. In the meantime, furniture your cottage with decorations like this lamp from Walmart that looks like an old pottery piece. The light will create a vintage look, since lamps used to be very popular, and the pottery appears old.
10) Bed Location
When you organize your cottage bedroom, your bed will probably be the biggest piece of furniture. Its size means it’s a centerpiece of sorts, so you’ll want to decide where to put it carefully. Since the bed is a centerpiece, it’s common to add wall art above it. Instead of using wall art, position the bed under a window, as somebody did with the bed in this picture by Nancy Sims. This way, you can use nature as the main decoration, and you can look outside from your bed.
11) DIY Built-In Bunks
Most cottages only have one or two bedrooms, so you might find yourself trying to cram too many people in a small space. There was a time when having multiple people in each room, or even in each bed, was a typical way of fitting people into a small house. You can bring back those times by building bunk beds into the walls. Built-in bunk beds will look like they belong, and you can use these instructions by John Petersik from Young House Love to build them.
12) Lighting
Cottages and lamps go together, but what else do you need to know about lighting a cottage bedroom? Another trick to maintain a cottage theme in your bedroom is to use light sources like candles and lanterns, or lamps that mimic the appearance of lanterns, as this one from Amazon does. Items like this give the feeling of resting in a different time period while you’re in your cottage room, and the lack of harsh lights will help you sleep better, whether you’re in a vacation cottage or cottage-style home.
13) Curtain Style
Cottages often have a distinct curtain style, with several curtains covering one window, as opposed to two curtains hanging from floor to ceiling. Furnish your bedroom with a curtain like this one from Walmart that resembles a traditional cottage style. The curtains will act as decorations, and keep light out if the sun hits the window at the wrong angle in the early morning or late evening. These curtains have a green design that goes well with browns or earth tones, but you can always choose curtains that better match your color scheme.
14) DIY Window Bed
Having a bed under a window makes the window a centerpiece and brings you closer to nature, but building a bed as a window seat takes it a step further. If you have a low window in your room, you can build your bed across it using the instructions in this article by SmartGirl with Smart Girls DIY. Such a bed will truly bring you into nature as you sleep. If the window is too high up for this, try building a loft bed so you can still experience the outdoors from the comfort and safety of your bed.
15) Grey Finish
When you pick your cottage furniture, think about what style you want and what impression you want to give. If you have a beach cottage, greys, whites, blues, and yellow and tan shades are good choices. For wood furniture, get pieces with a grey finish like this one from Amazon. This looks like weathered wood that you’d see on a beach or in the wilderness. This makes it a good choice, since it can match any cabin, and grey is a neutral color that’s easy to work with.
16) Twin
If your cottage is low on space, and particularly if you have a habit of bringing friends with you on vacations to your cottage, you’ll need to fit multiple people into each room. Try using narrow twins beds like the ones in this picture by Carol Brazel. Choose beds that you can slide together to make a single bed so that whoever is sleeping there’ll have more room if they get the room to themselves. Cottages are often shared spaces, and multiple twin beds have been a typical accommodation for a long time.
17) DIY Rustic Bedframe
A cottage will probably have a somewhat rustic style, particularly if it’s a mountain or forest cottage, or a rural retreat. Since the bed is likely the biggest piece of furniture or decoration you have, you’ll want to make it in a rustic style. Rather than try to find a rustic bed to buy, which can be difficult and expensive, try making one as Andrew and Kevin did in this Brojects video. Pallet wood is a useful resource, as are the rough planks they used, but ultimately you can use your imagination.
18) DIY Simple Wood Furniture
Cottages are simple places, and the bedroom should be no exception. When you look for a desk, nightstand, chair, and even your bed, try to find simple pieces. The bed might be more ornate since it’s a focal point of the room. If you can’t find what you want or have limited money, you can always build simple wood pieces like this nightstand by Jen Woodhouse. She provides free plans to get you started, and it’ll be one less piece to try and find in a store.
19) Indoor Citronella Buckets?
Can you put citronella indoors, and if so, what’s the point? If your cottage is a vacation home, you might not like it, but there’s a fair chance that bugs will make it into the house. Citronella can help with this, but ultimately the point of these buckets is decoration. These look like candles in buckets, which fits a rustic cottage theme, and if your bedroom has a door leading outside, you can bring the buckets outside with you to ward off insects and keep them from making it through the bedroom door.
20) Sheer Curtains
Part of the point of a cottage is to feel close to nature, but still be nice and cozy in your shelter. Cottages are also common vacation spots, so if you’re using yours for vacation, you don’t want to miss a second of daylight, and you want an incredible view from your bedroom window. One way to achieve both these things is to get sheer curtains like these from Amazon. Thin curtains still give you some privacy, but they let light in to wake you up in the morning and ensure that you get the most of your time.
Do you have any ideas we missed? What would you put in a cottage bedroom that we didn’t mention? Every cottage is unique, and we’d love to hear your ideas! Please tell us about them in the comments below.
