Colour stories
A printed bed is the largest patterned surface most rooms will ever hold. Here is how to place one without the room arguing with itself.
Let the bed be the only picture
If the bedding carries a subject — roses, a bear, a night sky — everything else in the room should be plain. Curtains, rug and lampshade in a colour lifted from the print will read as deliberate; a second pattern anywhere in the room reads as an accident.
Pull the wall colour out of the print, not the swatch book
Take the quietest colour in the design — the ground behind the flowers, the grey of the wood, the cream between tiles — and put it on the walls. The bed then looks placed rather than dropped in. The loudest colour belongs on something small: one cushion, one lamp.
Dark grounds need light around them
A navy or charcoal print swallows light. In a small or north-facing room, keep the walls and floor pale and let the bed be the dark object. Reverse that and the room closes in whatever the print costs.
Two beds in one room
Shared rooms work best with the same print in two colourways rather than two different designs, or with one patterned bed and one plain in a colour taken from it. The kids' rooms page goes further on that, including the age boundary that no decorating idea overrides.