Bedrooms are the rooms we spend the most time in and think about the least. They are also the easiest room in the house to improve, because almost everything in one is soft and therefore changeable.
The bed is the room
In a bedroom, the bed occupies most of the floor and almost all of the attention. Whatever else you do, if the bed looks flat the room looks flat.
The trick is layers, and layers only work if they differ. A duvet, a folded throw across the foot, two pillows for sleeping and two propped behind them. Four elements, four different weights of fabric. That is enough.
Adding more pillows does not make it better past a certain point. There is a threshold beyond which a bed stops looking generous and starts looking like a hotel that is trying too hard, and most of us cross it at about six.
Fabric does what colour cannot
A bed made entirely in one colour can still look rich, provided the fabrics are doing different things.
Cotton with a sateen weave has a soft sheen and reflects light. Percale is matte and crisp. Linen creases and absorbs light entirely. Put all three in the same shade of white on one bed and it reads as layered and deliberate. Put three colours in the same fabric and it reads as mismatched.
This is the most useful principle in soft furnishing, and it costs nothing to apply.
Crumpled is not untidy
Linen wrinkles. Washed cotton softens and loses its edge. Neither is a flaw, and trying to iron a bedroom into flatness removes the quality you paid for.
A bed that looks slightly lived in is warmer than one pressed into geometry. Smooth the duvet, straighten the pillows, and stop there.
Light low, and more than one source
A single ceiling light in a bedroom is the fastest way to make a nice room unpleasant. It is directly above you when you are lying down, which is the one place light should not be.
Two lamps at bed height, or wall lights either side, change a room completely. Warm bulbs, ideally around 2400K, and a dimmer if the fitting allows one. The aim is to be able to light the room at ten at night without it feeling like a kitchen.
The floor matters more than you think
The first thing your feet touch in the morning sets the tone of the room more than anything on the walls. A rug that reaches at least 60 cm out from the sides of the bed means you step onto something soft rather than onto boards.
Undersized rugs are the most common mistake in bedrooms. A rug that floats in the middle of the floor with a metre of bare board around it makes the room look smaller, not larger.
Take one thing out
Most bedrooms are improved more by removing something than by adding anything. The chair nobody sits in. The stack of things on the chest of drawers. The third bedside object.
A bedroom is the only room in the house whose job is to be calm. Everything in it should either be used or be worth looking at, and quite a lot of what accumulates in a bedroom is neither.
What to change first
If you only do one thing: change the bulbs to something warmer and put the light at bed height instead of overhead. It costs almost nothing and changes the room more than new bedding would.
Then the bedding, then the rug. In that order, and not all at once.