Bronze Interior Space and Exhibition Design · 2024
Blues Bedroom Interior Design
by Lea Shanati
- A' Design Award 2024 Bronze Winner in Interior Space and Exhibition Design
- Awarded April 15, 2024
- CLIENT: Lea Shanati
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 10,651
- Verification code F174F95115 · Verify this award
About Blues Bedroom Interior Design
Blues is a bedroom interior design created for an apartment in a Victorian building in Knightsbridge, London. The design turns a traditional bedroom into a calm retreat for a young couple. The colour palette of blue with gold accents reflects the water, sky and park views around the apartment. The curved arches of the building inspired the wallpaper, mirrors and lamps. Velvet, suede and leather add a tactile quality to the room. A lounge zone is included for relaxation. The bedroom covers about 344 square feet.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- We created a classic interior design in a Victorian Knightsbridge building. We turned a traditional bedroom into a serene haven for a young couple. Calming blue meets gold accents, mirroring park views and daily glows. Architectural arcs inspire our wallpaper, mirrors, and lamp designs, giving a dreamy elegance. Velvet, suede, and leather enhance tactile luxury with a lounge zone for relaxation. It perfectly fuses timeless and modern design, radiating light and rhythm.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The bedroom is 344.45 sq f
- Tags
- interior design, knightsbridge, london, bedroom, apartment, residential interior
- Production Technology
- The team consulted mid-production to understand the client's desires and the room's potential. Inspired by park views, they crafted a design ethos echoing nature with thoughtful material and colour choices. The room's curved architecture became a design element. Standout furniture like Baxter's Stone bed completed the vision. Seamless flow between bedroom and lounge was key. The final design is a luxurious haven, perfectly matching the client's dream.
- Design Challenge
- This project's most challenging yet exhilarating aspect was harmonising the external environment with the interior design. Given the apartment's remarkable park views, we felt a pressing responsibility to ensure the interior met this high benchmark. We aimed for a seamless union. Integrating the Victorian building's external arc elements into our design was also crucial. This inspired our curved arc motifs throughout the space. By meticulously selecting the right colour palette and design forms, we crafted a space that complements its prime location and rivals the beauty of its stunning views.
- Project Duration
- The project started in Spring of 2019, the bedroom was complete early 2020, the rest of the apartment was complete in 2021.
- Operation Flow
- This sanctuary transforms the client's life. Inspired by park views, the design seamlessly blends indoors and outdoors, fostering nature's embrace. Tranquil colours, reflecting water and sky, create urban calm. Curved lines and ethereal touches invite relaxation and reflection. Luxurious materials and details elevate daily life. The lounge, a blend of sophistication and warmth, offers an intimate escape. This is an unparalleled luxury designed for emotional and psychological well-being.
- Research
- The project began with an in-depth client brief analysis. Material's research achieved a vision of serene luxury. Breathtaking park views informed design ethos, creating a seamless indoor-outdoor flow. Inspired by nature's tranquillity, the colour palette fosters calmness. Architectural details, especially curved elements, influenced design components for an ethereal ambience. Throughout, research drove the integration of sophisticated design and luxurious materials, reflecting the client's desires.
- Inspiration
- Drawing inspiration from the apartment's surrounding park vistas, our design seamlessly integrates indoor and outdoor elements. The colours of water, sky, and air influenced our palette. At the same time, the building's architectural arcs echoed in our choices of wallpaper, mirrors, and lamps, infusing the room with an ethereal elegance.
- Image Credits
- Image Credits: Serhii Lozovskiy
Colors of Blues Bedroom Interior Design
Grand Interview about Blues Bedroom Interior Design
Bridging the historical and the modern is my absolute favourite type of project - it has essentially become my specialty. Achieving a balance between the historic grandeur of a Victorian townhouse and the sleekness of modern luxury requires treating the architecture as an active dialogue partner rather than a constraint. Whenever I start a project, I like to spend time in the space just observing how the light changes throughout the day and feeling the natural mood it evokes, which helps me accommodate the client's vision more organically. We were also incredibly fortunate with this space; the bedroom overlooks one of the most beautiful parks in London, all your eye catches are mature trees and a tranquil pond. What could be more serene? My immediate instinct was to bring that exact serenity inside, to visually elongate the landscape into the room itself.When analysing the room's traditional bones, I was deeply drawn to the classic Victorian arch. Instead of simply replicating it historically, I chose to extract its geometric essence and reinterpret it as a soft, fluid motif. I didn't want the bedroom to feel static or predictable, so we echoed these arch shapes throughout the space, in the wallpaper and the finer details. This softened arch geometry became the architectural anchor of the design. To maintain a deeply serene atmosphere, I avoided sharp contrasts or heavy, ornate period details. Instead, the transition between old and new is achieved purely through form and texture, making the luxury feel completely organic to the property's heritage.
Approaching this space, the psychology of design heavily influenced the color strategy. Blue is inherently restorative; it naturally lowers the ambient energy of a room and fosters a profound sense of tranquility, making it the ultimate hue for a personal sanctuary.My inspiration was drawn directly from the environment just outside the windows. Despite its gray reputation, London actually enjoys beautifully sunny days, and the sky here constantly surprises me - it creates a spectacular, shifting canvas that transitions from a crisp, light blue in the morning to the most profound, rich purples at dusk. My intention was to create a seamless visual loop, bringing the outside in and the inside out. By carefully selecting dynamic, layered tones of blue, the room actively responds to the environment. As the natural light shifts outside, the blue finishes inside the room change with it, deepening and softening to mirror the exact progression of the London sky.To ensure the palette remains warm and inviting, particularly as the room transitions to artificial lighting in the evening, we introduced deliberate touches of gold throughout the space. These metallic elements act as permanent rays of sun, catching the light here and there. They cast a warm, ethereal glow that ensures the blue palette always feels deeply luxurious and comforting, never cold.
To achieve true visual harmony, we first had to address the room's physical foundation. We made a deliberate decision to retain the main historical architectural elements - specifically the doors, the ceiling cornices, and the skirtings. However, rather than highlighting them traditionally, we treated them with a more minimal approach, stripping away heavy ornamentation to leave clean, classic profiles. This preserved the historical soul of the room while creating a much quieter, refined canvas.Against this grounded backdrop, my approach to the curved elements was rooted in abstraction. Instead of replicating intricate period details, I distilled the classic Victorian arch down to its purest, most fluid geometric form. I then used this abstracted curve as a subtle, recurring motif across the contemporary features.For example, the wallpaper introduces a soft, sweeping rhythm rather than a rigid, traditional pattern. Similarly, the lamps and lighting fixtures possess rounded, organic silhouettes that speak the exact same visual language. By establishing the minimal Victorian framework first, these contemporary curved elements don't compete with the architecture; instead, they create a gentle, subconscious rhythm, allowing the eye to glide easily through an uncluttered, modern sanctuary.
My guiding philosophy for this layout was that a bedroom does not have to live just one life - it shouldn't be reserved solely for sleeping. When you have a space this magnificent, anchored by such a mesmerizing view of the park, you naturally want to linger. I wanted to design a comprehensive retreat that the occupant simply wouldn't want to leave throughout the day. Within this 344-square-foot space, the zoning was entirely driven by the rhythm of daily rituals. The dedicated lounge area allows the room to transition fluidly. It provides a distinct, sunlit space to enjoy morning coffee or breakfast while looking out at the trees, and later becomes a cozy spot to read a book on the comfortable sofa before bed. Crucially, it also expands the room's narrative into an intimate social space - a private haven where you can invite a girlfriend in for a glass of champagne and a little gossip.To maintain flow between these distinct zones, I ensured the spatial division was psychological rather than physical. We used cohesive textures and the unified blue color palette to link the sleeping area to the lounge. By doing so, the distinct functional pockets communicate perfectly with one another, allowing the room to serve multiple purposes while maintaining its seamless, serene atmosphere.
For me, this decision was incredibly straightforward: the textures were entirely dictated by the fundamental purpose of the room. A bedroom must, above all else, feel unequivocally soft and cozy.I view interiors as a medium for emotional dialogue between the occupants and their environment, and in a bedroom, the tactile experience is just as important as the visual one. The materials we physically touch - or even just visually register as soft - communicate an immediate sense of safety and relaxation to the mind. By layering rich, absorptive materials like velvet and suede, we created a tactile cocoon. These fabrics don't just feel luxurious against the skin; they also soften the acoustics of the room and absorb the light beautifully, contributing to that quiet, serene atmosphere. The subtle introduction of leather provides a necessary structural contrast, adding a layer of sophisticated, tailored luxury without introducing anything cold or harsh to the touch. Ultimately, this specific palette ensures the room communicates absolute comfort at every sensory level.
To be completely honest, sometimes the space simply does the heavy lifting for you. When you have a view as commanding and beautiful as this Hyde park, it leaves you with absolutely no choice - the landscape practically demands to come into the room.My strategy in this case wasn't to manufacture a connection, but rather to gracefully surrender to it. The goal was to frame the view rather than compete with it. By using the blue color palette to mirror the sky and the pond outside, we allowed the mature trees to act as a natural, living extension of the interior walls.The real challenge, however, was ensuring that this expansive outdoor connection didn't compromise the intimacy of the bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling park views can sometimes make an occupant feel exposed. To counter this, I relied heavily on the spatial layout and the rich, absorptive textures we just discussed. By creating that soft, tactile "cocoon" within the room, the occupant feels deeply protected and grounded. You are able to sit in the lounge area or lie in bed and feel entirely connected to the changing seasons and the vastness of nature, while still remaining safely enveloped in a private, luxurious sanctuary.
Honestly, when you specialize in bridging historical and modern spaces, what many might consider "unexpected" challenges are often just the standard realities of working with period properties. In this Knightsbridge townhouse, we dealt with the typical structural quirks you find in older buildings - specifically, slight variations in ceiling heights and exposed structural beams.While these aren't unusual challenges for a project of this nature, they do strictly dictate the execution of the design. When you are aiming for a contemporary, clean-lined haven, you cannot have uneven architectural lines disrupting the visual harmony. These structural discrepancies meant that almost everything had to be meticulously tailored. It reinforced our decision to rely heavily on bespoke joinery, custom wall paneling, and carefully calibrated ceiling treatments. By custom-fitting the contemporary elements to the room's uneven historical bones, we were able to disguise the height differences and beams, ultimately delivering a flawlessly smooth, serene finish that feels both effortless and precise.
Because the room is graced with such large windows and unobstructed park views, nature provides all the illumination needed during the day. The daylight floods the space, so the artificial lighting strategy was entirely focused on the transition into the evening and what happens after dark.To maintain the room's ethereal quality, my approach was to create a highly flexible, layered lighting scheme rather than relying on a single, overpowering light source. For moments requiring full, general illumination, we incorporated elegant ceiling chandeliers. However, the true atmosphere of a bedroom is often created at a lower visual plane. We installed wall sconces that serve a dual purpose: they provide focused, functional task lighting for reading in bed, while also washing the walls with a soft, ambient glow. Finally, the addition of a table lamp introduces a crucial, intimate layer of absolute coziness. By separating the lighting into these distinct, independently controllable zones, the occupant can perfectly orchestrate the mood as the evening progresses, ensuring the space remains just as comforting and serene at midnight as it is in the midday sun.
As I touched on earlier, I envisioned the gold accents in this room as permanent rays of sun. Because the sun is our ultimate natural source of light and carries that beautiful golden warmth, it made perfect conceptual sense to apply the gold finishes specifically to the lighting fixtures. When the natural light fades, these fixtures essentially become the "suns" of the room, casting both literal light and a warm, metallic glow.To ensure these elements achieved maximum impact without overpowering the serene atmosphere, the key was absolute restraint in their physical form. We kept all the golden lines incredibly thin, sleek, and elegant. Instead of heavy, ornate metalwork that might feel too opulent or distracting, these slender profiles provide just a whisper of luxury. To tie the room together, we subtly repeated these delicate golden lines in a few select furniture elements. This creates a cohesive, subconscious rhythm throughout the space, ensuring the luxury feels light, deliberate, and entirely harmonious with the soft blue palette.
I fundamentally believe that every project must be a completely new exploration. While the success of the Blues Bedroom certainly deepened my technical expertise - particularly the nuanced understanding and meticulous problem-solving required when dealing with the quirks of historical properties - I do not believe in applying a rigid visual formula to future work.As designers, we continuously gain experience and expand our creative palettes with every property we touch. However, the actual design, the aesthetics, and the color strategies cannot be replicated from one historical property to the next. They must always remain bespoke. My aesthetic approach is entirely dictated by the unique architectural voice of the space itself and, crucially, by the psychology and vision of the people who are going to occupy it. The greatest takeaway from this project isn't a specific design template, but rather a reaffirmation of my core philosophy: true luxury in a historical setting comes from honoring the specific space and crafting an intimate, tailored dialogue with the individuals who live there.