This is why your bedroom feels so small.

By spending on the things that get left until last. Most of the budget goes to the bed and the paint, and the room still reads unfinished because the trim is white, the curtains stop short of the floor, the rug is too small and the only light is overhead. Hang the curtains high and let them touch the floor, paint the trim the wall colour, get a rug large enough for the front legs of the bed to stand on, and put lamps at the bedside. None of those is expensive and together they do more than a new bed.

One colour, carried over the walls, ceiling, trim and door. The instinct in a small bedroom is white walls to keep it airy, which produces a pale box with hard bright lines at every edge — and those edges are what tell the eye how small the room is. A soft enveloping colour taken over everything removes the boundaries. If you want light, make it a warm light colour rather than a white one, and still take it over the trim.

Yes, and go up in scale rather than down. A small busy print reads as texture from across a room and makes the walls feel close; a large repeat gives the eye a few big shapes to travel and the wall recedes. If a whole room of pattern feels like too much, paper the wall behind the bed and carry the same colour over everything else — the pattern then reads as deliberate rather than as a feature wall.

As close to the ceiling or cornice as the room allows, and as wide as possible either side of the window so the fabric stacks against the wall rather than the glass. Curtains hung just above the frame cut the wall in half and lower the whole room. They should also reach the floor and just touch it — a curtain stopping at the sill is the single most common reason a bedroom reads as unfinished, and lengthening it costs nothing but the fabric.

Not as the main light. A ceiling fixture lights the tops of heads and flattens everything, which is why hotel bedrooms rarely rely on one. Put the light where you use it: a pair of lamps at the bedside, warm at 2700K, on dimmers. A flush mount overhead is fine for finding things on a dark morning, but it should not be the light you read or undress by. Recessed downlights in a bedroom are always a mistake.

Larger than feels reasonable. The rug should run under the bed and extend far enough past it that both bedside tables sit on it, or at minimum that the front two legs of the bed do. A small rug floating in the middle of the floor makes a small bedroom look smaller, because the eye reads the rug as the size of the room. A large sisal or jute with a fine antique rug layered over it is the least expensive way to get the scale right.

Put the bed on the wall opposite the door, centred, with space either side for a table — even a narrow one. A bed shoved into a corner to gain floor space costs you the symmetry that makes a room read as considered, and the floor you gain is floor nobody uses. If the room genuinely cannot take bedside tables on both sides, use a wall-mounted light on the tight side rather than shrinking the bed. The other rule: do not line the walls with furniture. A small bedroom needs a bed, two tables and one other thing. A fourth piece is what makes it feel crowded, not the size of the room.

Usually, and it is worth finding. A single chair in the corner changes a bedroom from a room with a bed in it to a room you could sit in — which is most of what makes a bedroom feel like a proper room rather than a sleeping box. Keep it small and open: a slipper chair, a rush-seated side chair, or a bench at the end of the bed if the corner is genuinely tight. Avoid a large upholstered armchair with arms, which eats far more floor than its footprint suggests.

Yes. Photographs of the room and its rough dimensions are enough to begin. Commissions are taken remotely worldwide — what comes back is the room drawn as a finished interior, with every paint colour, paper, fabric, light and piece of furniture named and sourced, and a shopping list you can order from yourself or hand to your contractor.

From $750 for one bedroom, fully specified, in about two weeks. That covers the room designed and shown as a finished interior, paint colours and finishes, wallpaper, fabric, lighting and bulbs, hardware and floor covering, every piece named and sourced, and two rounds of revisions. More than one room is priced as a set rather than multiplied.