haughty and erudite: K's Room

Who doesn't love makeovers? I think this is probably why I adore redoing furniture and fixing things up: the before and after effect. Such a fun opportunity to get creative AND see results!

My friend K lives in San Francisco and, while she's so far away from me, we still keep in close contact. She recently moved and found a place in a great location, but the room itself is small. She was at a loss for what to do, so she sent me pictures for advice. Here are the pictures she shared (K, don't hate me for doing this!):

Room from the door (note the large window the to right):

The room from the door again but this is further to the right:

Her closet and the other side of the bed:

And lastly, the final corner of the room:

First of all, let me say how amazingly musically inclined she is and that I wish I could play the guitar (she has such a beautiful singing voice!)

Secondly, she wants to keep the bed, her new dresser and side table, and a very special jewelry armoire she inherited from her mother. She also wants to have some sort of desk area on which to use her laptop.

My initial thought was that I needed to flesh out the room more to get a good idea of the scale of the items in the room and also to give myself the ability to change things up quickly to see which layout might work best. Using Adobe Illustrator, Paint and a drawing program on Google - I created a template from which we could move the items around and better place with the space. The drawing program on Google is great; you can share and collaborate with others on it, so K and I played around.

This is the layout of her room currently:

After playing around for a while, I settled on this layout as my favorite:

In the lower left hand corner is where I envision her desk area. The window is nearby so it won't feel claustrophobic and she can use the side of her dresser for a nice little white board or cork board to keep her organized. It defines the space.

I've grouped the dresser and the jewelry armoir next to the closet so all of her dressing things are close together. This speeds up everything in the morning when she's trying to get ready.

I read somewhere a long time ago (don't know if this is accurate at all) saying that if you place your bed so that your feet are facing the door while you're laying in it, that all of your energy can escape through the door while you're sleeping. Since then, I've tried to keep this from happening.

Next, I started looking for things to pull the room together and help her make sense of some of the craziness. Here were some of the sets I put together on Polyvore: