Pastel Pretty: Building a Soft Bedroom Scheme

Pastel schemes go wrong in a predictable way. Several very pale colours are chosen, each perfectly pleasant on its own, and put together they cancel each other out, leaving a room that looks faintly sugary and slightly unresolved.

The fix is hierarchy. Choose one pastel to carry the room, keep it on the largest surfaces, and let the other two appear in much smaller quantities and, ideally, at slightly greater strength. A blush wall with mint and straw appearing only in textiles is a scheme; three walls in three pastels is a swatch book.

Pay attention to what sits underneath each colour. Pastels are pale versions of much stronger hues, and the parent colour still shows: a blush mixed from a warm coral behaves completely differently against timber than a blush mixed from a cool pink. Holding samples side by side in the actual room, at several times of day, is the only reliable test.

White is not automatically the right partner. A bright brilliant white next to a soft pastel can look hard and make the pastel look washed out. A chalkier off-white, or the palest version of the room's own colour used on woodwork, keeps the whole scheme in the same register.

Introduce one grounding element so the room has weight. A natural jute rug, a timber bed frame, a woven basket or a dark-framed print gives the eye somewhere to rest and keeps the softness from tipping into insubstantial. This single decision does more than any other to make a pastel room look considered.

Pattern works best small and repeated. Tiny florals, fine stripes, scattered dots in the room's own colours give texture from across the room and dissolve into softness up close, which suits a bedroom. A single large-scale pattern on one surface, curtains or a headboard, can carry a room, but two large patterns in pale colours usually fight.

Think about how the scheme ages. Pastels chosen as pale versions of grown-up colours, a dusty rose rather than a bubblegum pink, a sage-leaning mint rather than a bright one, stay wearable for years and take a change of bedding and art in their stride as tastes change.