Cabin Bedroom Reveal! Tips on Layering Patterns & Ideas for Increasing Rental Income…

Good morning! Happy Thursday! Coming to you with our very first “almost complete” room reveal inside Ever After Wonderland… John, Ab and I’s SECOND complete cabin renovation! Several months ago I had an Instagram contest and someone came up with the name “Ever After Wonderland” for this project. I love naming the properties I renovate so that I can reference them on my blog and social and just because I love each one having their own fun little name.

Although I knew I wasn’t completely finished with this space when I revealed it back in May, I thought I would simply be adding some lighting, a rug and then a few accessories and calling it complete! It wasn’t until we came up here for the weekend with all four of our kiddos that I realized a second bed would be perfect for the space. I realized that it would not only be more functional for our four, almost all teenagers, but it would also be a way to increase the number of people this cabin would sleep thus increasing the amount we could charge for a stay on Airbnb! Double duty!

In renovating a second home or vacation rental, there’s so many things you can do differently than a main residence. I always see it as a way to have a little more design fun since it is an “extra home” but functionality also works very differently in this type of home as well! If you think about it, there’s really no need for tons of dressers or closet space. Usually people pack up a simple suitcase and that’s about it. Therefore, you can max out each bedroom with sleeping space rather than making room for so much storage. Hence the reasoning that one bedroom in this cabin will have two full sized bed and the other now has two queen sized beds!

Jumping right into the next topic… LAYERING PATTERNS! I am determined as I chatted about on Instagram the other day, to start really diving into the design process that goes on in my mind when I am working on a space. I will cover two topics on this post… visual weight and how to select the right patterns for layering…

I almost always start a design with a random point of inspiration. Sometimes it’s a wall color I’ve been dying to use or a wallpaper that I’ve stumbled upon at some point that I love! For this bedroom, it was a combination of two things… this wallpaper that I fell in love with along with something I had seen a few months back that combined this a rusty red color with a shade of blue/green. One thing I’ve believed since very early on in my design career is that the ceiling is the most forgotten plane of design. It’s like the fifth wall that can sometimes make the most impact! I’ve done painted stripes on ceilings, reclaimed wood, wallpaper and everything in between. For this room, I thought it would be fun to use this wild geometric pattern on the ceiling!

And since this pattern is so wild, I strongly felt that everything else needed to be very mild and tone on tone. As much as I am a maximalist and love all fun and pretty things, sometimes less really is more. And sometimes you lose a beautiful focal point by putting “too many pretty things” in a space that in turn overwhelms the true focal point. In having said all of that, I also feel that visual weight is a huge part of my design process! This ceiling feels so heavy visually so I wanted to ground it with a similar warm color. I found this rug and absolutely fell in love with it! In terms of combining patterns, my basic rule is that you can somewhat “easily” combine a geometric, abstract and repeat (non-geometric) pattern almost without fail as long as the colors all work together. Given that the contrast in the two colors on the wallpaper is so strong, I wanted the coloring in the floor pattern to be very “smeared” and muted looking. The warmth of the red tones in the rug gives it visual balance but the overall mild pattern doesn’t overtake the wallpaper. Whew! Hope that makes sense! So without chatting your head off anymore, here is the completed space! And when I say completed… I mean not quite complete! LOL! We will be adding sconces and possibly a mirror but otherwise yes, it is done!