A bedroom, perhaps more than any other room, provides the opportunity to express yourself and your personality in the décor. So you should definitely think about the type of atmosphere and feel you are trying to create in the room:

• Is it a calming oasis where you retreat from the hectic modern world?
• Do you want to step back in time to a Victorian boudoir, or sixties hippy chic?
• Or is your bedroom a shrine to monochrome minimalism?
• Is it the master bedroom, the guest room, or a child's bedroom? 
• Do you want to keep it flexible, by maybe using a neutral colour scheme and then changing the mood by changing the lighting, bedding, curtains, pictures etc?
• Is there actually much space to us the décor creatively, or is most of the wall space taken up with storage (wardrobes, chests of drawers, mirrors, etc)?

One of the most frequently used bedroom designs is the classic "three neutral walls and one (often wallpapered) feature wall".  It's easy to plan and implement, it works, and it allows you to express your individuality without being overpowering.  

Here's another take on the same basic design idea, this time for a teenage girl's bedroom. Well, a teenage girl and her cat who, it has to be said, didn't really go with the colour scheme!

Again, three walls were painted in a neutral colour (on this occasion, Dulux Egyptian Cotton), and one wall was wallpapered with a pale duck egg blue design.  Soft furnishings were chosen in a stronger teal colour which complimented the duck egg nicely (and which met with the cat's approval!).

This is one of my favourite "three neutral walls and one wallpapered feature wall" bedrooms, not just for the finished room itself, but for the complete transformation the room received. The "before and after" shots really tell the story - the job included a lot of prep following the removal of fitted wardrobes on what was to become the feature wall. The doors were replaced, the ceiling and woodwork painted white, the other walls painted in a neutral colour (coincidentally, this room used Dulux Egyptian Cotton as well), and finally the wallpaper was hung to complete the transformation.

NB: The web site/browser crops the photos to best fit your screen size, but if you click on them they will display at full size.

OK, you can have too much of a good thing, so let's leave the "three neutral walls etc" idea for now, and look at a few other schemes. You could of course wallpaper all the walls. This creates a very bold, striking result, which isn't to everyone's taste, but the customer in this case loved it, and that's all that matters.

Again, I've shown before and after shots, and if you click on any of the photos you can enlarge them to full size.

NB: Once the room was "completed", it was decided that we would replace the bedroom door with a modern white one, which really finished the room off nicely.

Another option of course is not to have a feature wall at all, keeping all the walls neutral.  This can work particularly well in a guest bedroom, as in this first example (below), or in smaller bedrooms, or if you plan to furnish the room with strong coloured fabrics, or hang lots of pictures on the walls.

Here's another "all neutral" spare room, but this time some interest has been added by using patterned wallpaper below the dado rail. But because everything is still in pale, neutral colours, the room still feels bright, airy and clean.

Sometimes a plain simple design is the best approach because a room is smaller or dark, as in this case (below).

The room in question is a bedroom on the ground floor of a Victorian house, which has been converted into flats. Although there is a window, there is a 6ft fence the other side of the alleyway, and as a result hardly any natural light gets into the room. We therefore painted all the walls using a pale cream colour from the Dulux "Light & Space" range, which is specifically designed to be used in this sort of situation. We also took out the existing fitted wardrobes, and replaced them with new ones using sliding mirrored doors, which both save on space and also help to reflect light around the room.

Another example of a very calm, simple colour scheme that serves as a perfect backdrop to everything else in the room:

This student bedroom isn't huge, so we kept it clean and simple for the most part, with a fresh coat of white on the ceilings and woodwork, and magnolia on three of the walls. But we then gave it a little "bling" with some ultra-glittery gold wallpaper on one wall!

I really like this modern bedroom. By keeping the rest of the decorating simple (white ceiling and woodwork, grey walls - I think it was Dulux Trade Vinyl Matt "Chic Shadow"), the wallpaper on the feature wall really makes a statement!