“To me, stripes are the purest form of pattern and the best way to pair colors and see how they react (my favorite activity!),” she explains in an email. “You’d think after 13 years of designing stripes I’d get sick of them, but there’s so much you can do with a stripe—and an infinite number of color combinations that can allow you to see each individual color in a new way. There’s something very relaxing to me about a perfectly balanced stripe—be it via color combination, widths in relation to color, or scale.”
Shannon absolutely loves “a striped bedding moment.” Plays on shirting stripes always remind her of a button-down shirt (or pajamas), which looks clean, preppy, and signifies that it’s time for bed. There are so many variations of stripes: pinstripes, pencil stripes, halo stripes, awning stripes, hairline stripes, candy stripes, butcher’s stripes, track stripes, etc. “I think that that’s a very digestible way for someone to add color into a bedroom,” she adds.
Dim the lights
Lighting serves a variety of purposes, but setting the mood should never be a complicated process. Shannon specifically appreciates how lighting can add more color, movement, and texture to a space. Kat Bell, cofounder of Argyle Design, is a huge advocate for ambient lighting. “I’m personally super sensitive to lighting and I think a lot of people don’t realize how much that can affect a space or your mood,” she says.
Shannon fully agrees while emphasizing that “you don’t want to just be on or off” so being able to control the level of dimness is the way to go. “Having the ability to adjust light depending on your mood, having separate bed lights on each side so that if one person wants to stay up and read, the other [can] to go to sleep, or whatever the case might be, I think that’s really important,” she adds. You want your bedside lighting to complement the space, not disrupt it.
Embrace the power of sconces and orbs
Not only do Martha Hunt and Emma Chamberlain have similar fabrics for their custom bed frames, but the stars were also on the same wavelength for lighting their bedrooms with orbs. Martha opted for a pair of vintage Italian sconces from the 1950s while Emma chose a large globe light from JF Chen. “I always love a milk glass globe, I think that just never goes out of style,” Shannon says. Sebastian often adds sconces on the headboards for clients that are big bibliophobes because “getting up after reading and turning off all your lights is mayhem.” (This is where installing separate bed lights also comes in handy.)
