The furniture element we recently decided to ditch

Pictured: red kilim pillow, curtains, wood bench, rug

While our new (although I cannot believe we’re approaching a year since we closed on our house) master bedroom isn't really small from a square footage perspective, it has one of those deceiving layouts that makes furniture placement trickier than anticipated. I think that rooms with bay windows tend to do that.

For the first several months living here, we had our room arranged the only way we thought possible, given our king size bed and other furniture. It allowed for a lot of space beside the windows, but as is so often the case in bedrooms, that space was literally never used (unless you count accumulating clothes on the floor as use). Instead, we walked the same small path through our room all the time—from the bed to the closet to the bathroom to the door, essentially ignoring a third of the room’s square footage. While I typically prefer to enter a bedroom and face the foot of the bed, in our case, it chopped the room in half, essentially deeming a third of the room’s square footage unusable. So while in theory our room was set up logically and sensibly, the way we functioned in the room actually made it feel really illogical and cramped.

At first it was just plain discouraging because I knew that a simple rearrangement wasn’t really feasible with our furniture. But after feeling particularly frustrated in our room one day, I decided to try a change anyway, setting up the bed on the shorter wall of bay windows to elongate the room. The problem was that I knew that there wouldn’t be room for our nightstands on either side, so I wasn’t sure how this solution could ever be a permanent one.

But guess what—we love our room without our bulky nightstands. We realized that in our case, the two pieces didn’t do much other than become burial grounds for half full water glasses and dust (not to mention the drawers—they were truly just junk drawers for corralling everything from magazines to cards to loose change to power cords to our dog's leashes. I’m definitely a person who likes things to *appear* neat, but behind closed doors/drawers—it’s a real free for all). Now that we no longer have our nightstands, and instead just a small decorative stool on one side for flowers and a candle, we’re more inclined to actually pick up! As opposed to having two large surfaces to let things build up, we’re now much more apt to bring our water glasses downstairs each morning or put away our books and iPads.

One more amazing bonus? Our phones now charge on our dresser on the other side of the room, so not only are we doing less scrolling in the dark, but I’m forced to get out of bed each morning to turn off my alarm. This has surprisingly done wonders for my weekday mornings. For some reason, even those few steps across the room are enough to keep me from crawling back into bed (most days, anyway).

I still love the look of nightstands in large, spacious bedrooms—but in ours, or in any other without ample space for the extra furniture flanking the bed, I’ve decided they can be ditched in favor of better flow throughout the rest of the room. Other cool alternatives to traditional nightstands are none at all, floating shelves on the wall, stacks of books, a chair, or like ours: a little stool. And how cool are lights that hang from the ceiling?

PS: I’ll be sure to show our full master bedroom soon; it still needs some trim paint and other magic :)