This Cool Eclectic Bedroom Will Make You Green With Envy

When you're constantly surrounded by beautiful décor and you spend your workweek styling interiors, it's only natural that you'd start collecting items for your home. But for Emily Henderson's editorial director, Brady Tolbert, this proved a challenge when it came time to redecorate his bedroom.

"As a stylist, there is nothing I love more than slowly collecting pieces at antique shops, thrift stores, and flea markets to give a home character, so I wanted to bring that look into my room," he tells MyDomaine. The issue? Figuring out how to incorporate the unique furniture and original art he'd collected so that his bedroom felt considered, not chaotic.

"I wanted my bedroom to be casual, collected, eclectic, and mostly somewhere that I could relax at the end of the day," he says. The result is just what we'd expect from the budding design pro: Textured vintage finds pepper the room, lighting is layered, and artworks add a punch of personality. Then there's the standout feature: a forest green upholstered headboard that Tolbert made himself.

Take a peek inside the carefully curated bedroom that's made us green with envy.

Tolbert's velvet headboard might look like a high-end find, but he admits it's actually a surprisingly easy DIY project. "I kept coming up short finding something that not only worked well for the space, but the low window that it had to live under too," he explains. "So I decided to come up with a DIY option and took the matter into my own hands by making a custom channel tufted headboard."

The project involved covering wood panels in foam and fabric to create the channel tufted headboard. Surprisingly, it took just one weekend. "It was such a fun and easy project for me and really transformed the look of the space," he said.

Despite the eclectic mix of high-end finds, Tolbert says the most important item to splurge on in a bedroom isn't furniture, it's bedding. "Although everyone will tell you that you spend a third of your life in bed, it never really occurred to me the drastic difference of quality sleep you get when you are sleeping in decent sheets," he says. "The relaxed textiles and neutral colors that I used from Parachute's line also make styling the bed in the morning so easy."

One of the biggest challenges was the layout, Tolbert tells us. "The room is awkwardly very long and narrow, so finding the right layout for the room proved to be tricky for me. I had originally tried having the bed adjacent to the windows, but it felt a bit too cramped. It also made getting in and out of the room hard as the door was just at the foot of the bed."

The solution was to design the room in distinct sections. "I ultimately placed the bed under the windows and divided the space into a "sleeping area" where the bed is, and then a "lounge area" where the bench, chair, and TV are."

It's clear that Tolbert loves collecting. "Bringing in some of the handmade artisan pieces like the MQuan ceramic accessories, the handmade Safari Chair, and the DIY headboard really set the tone for the space," he says. "Then mixing those elements in with some iconic midcentury pieces like the Serge Mouille sconce and the storage hutch helped the room to come together."

The wood cabinet doesn't just add color and texture to the room, it also serves a practical purpose. The doors fold back to reveal a TV, hidden from sight during the day. "I love the cabinet that I retrofit to house my TV because it allows me to pull the TV out when I want to use it and then push it away when it is not in use. As much as I love TVs, I hate the visual appearance of it in the room, so this was a perfect solution," he says.

Lighting also plays a pivotal role. Gilded sun-shaped sconces glow in the entrance and an architectural armed sconce adds overhead light above the bed. "I love the huge sconce as it adds an oversize graphic element, which creates a lot of drama in the space. It also provides a little reading light for me that I can easily flip on and off from my bed with a switch."