When we redesigned a family home in Surrey, I suggested making the master bedroom pitch-dark. I offered a softer version alongside it, as I usually do. But ultimately, the clients chose the dark one, and they now tell me it was the best decision of the whole project. And the reason it always works? A bedroom asks something different of us.
It is the one room in a house built around a state we are not awake to experience, and almost everything that determines whether it works — the air, the darkness, the quiet — is invisible. Taking inspiration from Japanese bedrooms, these are the five things I have come to treat as non-negotiable.
