Isn’t it amazing how one photo in a design magazine can stick with you? It’s happened to me before—a rusty orange rug in the bedroom of a Colorado home, a cool steel window in a Wyoming residence, a certain cerulean vase on the bookshelf of a Manhattan loft. I remember these random, tiny details, just like I remember a bedroom I saw in a spread in a magazine last year. Oh, was it ever perfect.

There was a four-poster bed—not the old fashioned kind, with mosquito netting or curtains hanging all around—but a more squared-off, contemporary bed that was much more updated than the old traditional four-posters. It was adorned in simple, clean white linens; at certain angles, they almost looked gauzy. The walls of the bedroom were a mottled, taupe-gray-brown color—one I just can’t get out of my head because it was so beautiful. The resulting color scheme—the rustic brown of the bed frame, the subtle taupe of the wall, and the white of the linens—was really something special. It’s remained in my gut ever since.

What I loved about this bedroom—whose magazine spread, unfortunately, I tossed out with the trash one morning—was its intentional simplicity. There weren’t mirrors on the walls or decorative pillows on the beds, no ornate rugs or vases with reeds. There was only simplicity—but miraculously, it wasn’t cold and sterile.

I must be drawn to rooms like this because they don’t even come close to resembling every day life in my own house. In my house, the bedrooms are lived in—lived in to the Nth degree—and that’s okay.

But for The Lodge bedrooms (above), which will ultimately be a haven not just for me and my family, but for guests, I plan on starting things off right. The right bed, the right linens, and the right paint color are my focus right now, and I plan to get those in place and re-evaluate before adding any other furniture or accessories.

I know that level of simplicity is difficult to pull off, and as a woman, the need to build a nest can often involve adding, adding, adding. But since I’m starting with a clean slate, I’m considering it a personal challenge to reproduce the feeling of that original bedroom I saw in the magazine.
I just hope I don’t forget what it looked like.

by Pioneer Woman