This Dining Room Staple Might Belong in Your Bedroom
For storage in a small bedroom, furniture with drawers and cabinets (like dressers and nightstands) are traditionally the way to go. However, it’s possible to find other creative ways to squeeze in extra space for stashing your things. One New York homeowner in particular brought a dining room staple into her bedroom and it makes a lot of sense.
Michelle Trinh lives in a 700-square-foot two-story apartment in the West Village of Manhattan. Trinh wasn’t initially sold on the space because it needed some serious work, but its location and design potential eventually persuaded her to make an offer. “I ended up doing a gut renovation on the entire place,” she says. “The concept was simple: Combine Parisian charm with New York resourcefulness,” Trinh says in her house tour. “I love old-world charm and art, and I love maximizing my space to be multi-functional.” That ingenuity came in handy when creating spots for storage in her small unit — especially inside her bedroom, one of the tightest quarters in the house.
“Despite the home’s small size, there is room for luxury!” Trinh says. So she doubled down on a key piece of furniture that looks luxe, fits her design style, and offers as much storage potential as possible in her bedroom despite its small footprint: the Isla Buffet from Anthropologie.
Typically, you’d see a piece like this in a dining room setting to corral things like dinnerware, wine glasses, and serving items. Here, though, its low-slung, fairly shallow silhouette fits perfectly into a wall niche, bringing along with it both drawer and cabinet storage. The different dimensions of its internal compartments offer places to stash items big and small — and you can definitely put more here than just clothes.
It took vision for Trinh to consider a sideboard for her bedroom, but truly, its size and shape fit the unique architecture in the space better than even a compact conventional tallboy dresser would. This is exactly why you should always consider something unexpected for your storage needs in all of your home’s rooms. In fact, when asked about her nontraditional decorating ideas, perhaps Trinh sums it up best: “Decorate and design for yourself. Don’t worry about resale or what other people will think. You’re the person who has to live in it every day.”