Staycation in Style: 9 Tips to Style Your Bed Like a Hotel

The proverbial cherry atop a long haul flight is always the arrival at the hotel—the turn of the key, the drop of the bags and finally the chance to collapse on a clean, comfortable bed that must surely be better than our own if we paid this much for it. Truth be told: achieving hotel style in the comfort of your own space need not be expensive or require your watch to be reset to local time. Below, we unpack nine tips to transform your own bedroom in luxury hotel style without ever having to leave the bed at all.

Outfit your bed in all white

A common theme across luxury hotels, white bedding is used to promote a sense of relaxation, newness and cleanliness among incoming hotel guests. Simulating the experience of floating on a cloud, former Vice President of Design for Westin and Sheraton Erin Hoover explains, “the all-white bed created this halo effect. People thought a room had been renovated, even if it was just the bed that had been changed. It had a huge impact.”

Nail this look with our White 100% French flax linen bedding set.

Perfect the pillow pile up

In matters of luxury hotel trimmings, pillows make all the difference. Think more is more—a stack of pillows in different shapes and sizes will promote a sense of luxury and opulence, and also make for easy accessorizing in the bedroom.

Shop our 100% flax linen regular or European pillowcases in a range of colourways and assemble symmetrically across the bed for a deluxe appeal.

Attempt your own turndown service

If you want to emulate the hotel bedroom experience to a tee, implement your own turndown service every evening for the ultimate sense of luxury at home. Think of the turndown service as another step in your night-time routine, to help unwind and ready for bed.

Adjust your lighting

The staples of any hotel bedroom, lamps and sconces are the luxurious yet affordable bedfellows readily available to us at home. Consider your choice of bulb colour carefully—the warmer the better—and opt for an alternative with a lower wattage. Placed or hung by either bedside, these can ease the brain to sleep and still help you to navigate to your bathroom without having to switch on all of the lights. Where possible, avoid blue light—this will disrupt the body’s circadian rhythms much like our technology devices—and consider alternatives like LED.

Care less about thread counts

In spite of what sleep experts may advise—and many advise that you purchase sheets with a high thread count of 300 or more—opt for linen bed sheets like Bed Threads instead that don’t have a thread count at all. In reality, a higher thread count does not equate with better sleep and cannot be produced organically—variations in the 800-1200 range will actually be woven into the fabric artificially, by machine or other manufacturing devices. Focus instead on the GSM or grams per square metre of bedding materials that clue us in on a material’s weight. Our linen has a GSM of 170—making it lightweight, durable, easy to dry, cool in the summer and insulating in the winter—basically the only logical bedding choice.

Curate your bedside table

Hotel bedsides are always clean, minimal and neat, oozing a sense of refinement and organisation we may otherwise lack in our daily lives or bedrooms at home. These are easy to replicate on any budget with a less-is-more mindset and a decluttered approach. In these corners, personalise the impersonal hotel bedside table and consider replacing the ordinary telephone or clock with framed photographs, flowers or plants. For an uncanny hotel feeling, choose either of our delicious candles to strike the balance of a staycation perfectly.

Consider a theme

Battling for business against millions of competitors in every corner of the world, hotels often differentiate their bedrooms by deploying a theme. Whatever you choose, create a sense of continuity by outfitting your bathroom in a similar palette or style, or even adding a similarly coloured rug in the bedroom space to ensure a consistent scheme. Themes are opportunities to customise the bedroom and make it your own—a feature wall, printed wallpaper or hanging art will achieve this effect.

Be sure to keep your bed at the forefront of these choices so it can draw attention in the best of ways—do this easily by purchasing one of our monochromatic linen colourways or create a unique bedroom space by building your own bundle.

Sleep on a featherbed

Layered on top of mattresses to make for softer sleeping, a featherbed is another alternative to recreate an authentic hotel bedroom experience. You’ll find these in the bedrooms of Marriot and W hotels—to name a few—used to help lull guests to sleep and incentivise them to stay on for another night, and then another.

Invest in a better mattress

This one speaks for itself—mastering a hotel-like bedroom experience begins and ends with the bed, which is the last place to cut corners. Once you’ve settled on a mattress you’d be happy to dream on for a nightly fee at a boutique hotel, make that your priority purchase and then outfit with any of our Bed Threads to please all year round—especially if there's no time to take a vacation.

For more from Jen Nurick, follow her on Instagram @jennurick and read her work at JENNURICK.com.

FYI, this is how you know you're buying real flax linen.