Our Bedroom: Zen from a Modern Japanese Perspective

352

Japandi
HDB (BTO)
~700 sqft
2 br
Couple Living

よ！ Shh.. Welcome to the bedroom. It's a warm, cozy little part of our home. It's calm and quiet, perhaps the most important part of the entire home. Our bedroom is simple and minimal, and we intended to keep it that way. No wardrobe, no TV, no bookcase, nothing of the sort. Just peace, as your eyes are drawn to fluffy sheets upon a partially sunk-in mattress, intentionally designed to resemble warm futons laid over the floor with a neo-retro ryokan feel. Hitotema.home is a Modern Japanese (not japandi) cozy 3 room BTO, designed to bring traditional elements of Japanese houses into the modern era.
Let's chat outside the bedroom for a bit. Mind your step. As you'd notice from the previous photo, a single step divides the noise and energy of city living and the rest of the home from the bedroom. The significance of this step cannot be understated. As you step up towards the bed, your body and mind begins to calm down as you prepare to find emotional rest. Now, how do we achieve perfect bedroom zen? Kanso (簡素): First, we remove distractions, clutter and artificial elements from a bedroom. By separating the space with a sliding door, we allow the walk-in wardrobe and bathroom to be distanced from our restful area. Yet, everything is still en-suite for a luxurious master bedroom impression. Shizen (自然): Next, insist on natural elements to form your space. Leather, wood and fabrics are warm to the eyes and calming to the mind. Contrasting soft-touches with weighted, solid materials make our bedroom grounded and inviting. Shibui (渋味): Lastly, do not be tempted to fill blank and empty walls with stuff. Feature walls, floating shelves, dead/corner-space optimization and all that are the rage these days. By purposefully ignoring those and letting negative space exist, the other intentionally designed elements become elaborated in an understatedly elegant way.
Yet, storage space in a small BTO is important. At the foot of the bed, two large flip-up storage compartments are built in, allowing us to store bedding and linen along with other miscellaneous things at an easy-to-reach distance. Not only does everything get neatly tucked away, it also removes a significant load from our wardrobe space, freeing up the closets for the more relevant items other than bedding.
At the head of the bed, 2 pockets on each side replace the usual expectations of bedside tables. This allows us to enjoy modern necessities like sockets and switches at an arm's reach from the pillows without adding to visual and artificial clutter. The switch you see is a three-way switch, to control the mood light atop the headboard. We've got one on each side of the bed, as well as one on the wall at the entrance of the bedroom as part of the switch cluster.
To open up the space when needed, we have a sliding window on the left side of the bedroom that reconnects the bedroom with the rest of the house in the day. Instead of glass, frosted acrylic was used to match the shoji windows in our living room. This window serves as a path of natural light into the corridor, and, admittedly, also let's us know when we forget to turn off a light before bed. Ha. We jokingly also refer to this as the drive-thru window, especially if the missus needs a glass of water refilled from the fridge in the kitchen. _Btw, how much is that doggie in the window?_
On the right, it's curtains. Simple. Otherwise, some products for you to consider that we thought useful too for keeping things organised.
The one thing chef insisted on for the bedroom were smart curtains. Although we felt a fully smart home wasn't necessary, this piece of tech has helped improve the quality of home living immensely. In the mornings just before waking, the smart-curtains open, allowing the morning glow to fill the room with light. It's a great waking feeling. Later, as the sun begins to set, the curtains shut, creating the appropriate mood for winding down with an intimate privacy. For curtains, we opted not to go with a 100% blackout curtain. It's just unnaturally dark when closed, and in the daytime, blackout curtains just look like a black hole with light pouring out through the cracks, corners, gaps and the entire surrounding edge. If you don't know what we mean, google images of black holes. We went for an 80-90% curtain with a day curtain behind. Still serving its intended purpose, but yet with some light creating a subtle glow against the colour of the curtain fabric. The missus will vouch that this curtain is more than sufficiently blocking for any unscheduled naps.
That's the bedroom! What's behind this door then? Stay tuned to our next post!