House Walkthrough 3 - Master Bedroom

The master bedroom sits next to the kids bedrooms on the West edge of the house. It too is not an especially large space, measuring around 3.6mx3.6m. This should provide just enough space for a double bed, a couple of bed-side tables, a corner chair and some sort of make-up station (I have no idea what this is called). The bedroom will have access to the outside wood deck via sliding French doors. It’s nice to be able to easily ventilate the space and perhaps to have a place outside to sit if one of us wakes up early.

Connected to the Master bedroom is a spacious Walk-In-Closet. We have one of these where we live now but, because our place is quite small, it ceased being simply a closet very early on. Currently it houses almost everything we have, from rice to soap to skis and golf clubs. It is also pretty badly designed with baskets all below knee height, organized two-deep. This means that the stuff at the back barely ever gets looked at, let alone used.

The master bedroom (LHS) and Walk-In-Closet (RHS). The connecting room at the top is the study.

Two (rather boring) aspects of the Walk-In-Closet

Despite the current quirky setup, we do like the concept of having a Walk-In-Closet as it allows the bedroom itself to be relatively free of furniture. Having a space designated as just for clothes means that you don’t have to constantly look at them so we’ve made this space large enough to hopefully preclude ever having to store clothes elsewhere (with the exception of shoes and coats in the genkan).

Originally, our builders were going to furnish this for us but we have actually opted to leave the space empty. One of the reasons for this is to save cost but the other is that we really like the IKEA options that we saw. We had to play around a bit with the dimensions of this room and the position of the doorways in order to accommodate the IKEA PAX range, which is what we are expecting to use.

A word on doorways – we have moved the doors several times and have opted for just an opening from the Master Bedroom to the closet. We felt that opting for no door would make both the closet and the bedroom seem more spacious and that we could always add a curtain at some stage if we needed some separation.

We also decided to include another door in the closet leading to the study. The reason for this was to give us the flexibility to swap the study and the bedroom around at some stage if our needs change. In a way, it also gives us more of a feeling of “our” space since the three areas will be connected. Since it will double as a corridor of sorts, it’s going to be important to keep the closet very tidy. Challenge accepted.