Lamp Shades for Bedrooms

How to avoid making mistakes when choosing lamp shades for your bedroom and how to choose even when you don't know where to start.




Lamp shades come in many shapes, colors and designs and they are a great way of enhancing your bedroom décor provided they are in keeping with the style of your room.

If you are not sure what style of room you are hoping to achieve, start with thinking about that because a room with different styles vying with each other for attention is never going to look good.

For example, you could have a contemporary bedroom which has a minimalist theme with plain walls, window treatments and bedding and a simple metallic bed. Then you could add some superb lamps and shades in chrome and glass, even a contemporary chandelier and it would look a million dollars. Your lamps shades and lighting might be the focal point for the room in this instance especially at night.

On the other hand, you might choose a period look bedroom with a carved wooden bed and more ornate curtains with valances in rich colors. With a bedroom like that a couple of tall candle type table lamps with small shades in pleated silk might look more appropriate.

Then there are the nursery type shades which are designed and only appropriate for small kid's bedrooms or shades and lamps featuring football teams, movie stars, cartoon characters or ballet dancers suitable for older children with a particular hobby or favorite theme.

In fact, many of us are better at designing bedrooms for our kids than we are for ourselves. That's because kid's rooms lend themselves nicely to a theme whereas we are often afraid of choosing a particular look and end up choosing bedding we like with one look, lamp shades we "don't mind" with another and curtains from a third. We may cast an eye over our color selections making sure everything "goes together" but we are still not keeping to one style.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who decide that everything must come from one rage and they choose curtains, bedding and lamp shades which have the exact same design. That is too over the top and can make your bedroom look contrived. Or we choose everything in plain white or cream for fear of "getting it wrong".

If you are at a loss for how to design your bedroom, it may be that you just need make a decision that you will take the time to design it rather than let things you see in the stores and buy on the spur of the moment lead you into a lack of design.

Perhaps you just need inspiration.

If your home does not lend itself to one particular style or another and your bedroom is quite featureless that can be a problem. If you don't know where to start designing your bedroom and lighting, spend some time looking through interior design magazines and web sites so that you can pick out the kind of looks that you like until a particular look or theme solidifies in your mind.

You don't have to follow the magazines or the sites and buy everything they suggest - that would probably be prohibitively expensive. It's the general look that you like that you are trying to find. And don't rule out browsing through lighting catalogs and sites either because you would not be the first person to fall in love with a particular lamp shade or light and build a bedroom around it!