Where the master bedroom takes every finish available to it, this second bedroom takes five. Grey fluting behind the bed, white panelled joinery, one gold sunburst, one ring pendant and a floating ledge. In most Dhaka flats the second bedroom becomes the room that absorbs whatever is left over, a spare television, a desk nobody uses and suitcases stacked on top of the wardrobe. This one was given two jobs, sleeping and dressing, and allowed to refuse everything else.
That refusal is what lets a modest room feel unhurried, and it is also what made it harder to get right. With five elements in a room, every one of them is visible. Rib spacing on the fluting, the diameter of the sunburst and the drop of the pendant were all settled on site with the pieces held up, not chosen off a supplier page. The study function this room does not carry was given a space of its own in the prayer room and study design in Uttara Sector 6, which is why nothing in here has to fold away or double up.
Grey Behind the Bed Where the Flat Uses White
The headboard wall is fluted in grey, the only grey surface in an apartment otherwise held to white and cream. Convention says keep a small bedroom pale on the theory that pale reads larger. What pale actually delivers in a room taking hard morning light is a wall that throws it straight back at whoever is still asleep. Grey absorbs it. The room photographs slightly smaller and lives considerably better at half past six. The fluting runs floor to slab with no break at headboard height, so the wall stays one surface and the bed is simply parked against it. Vertical white ribs do the opposite job in the modern living room design in Uttara Sector 6, where the aim was height rather than quiet.
One Pendant Where a Matched Pair Is Expected
A single ring pendant hangs on one side of the bed, with a two drawer nightstand and a lamp point on the other. Matched pendants either side is the default, and it was wrong here, because the room is not symmetrical and forcing symmetry onto an asymmetric room shows immediately at the wall junctions. What was given up is the tidy look of a pair in a photograph. What was gained is a light on the side that actually gets read on, and a clear surface on the side that holds a phone and a glass of water.
Above the bed hangs a gold sunburst, the only ornament in the room and the only warm metal in it. Its finish was matched to the sconces in the modern dining room design in Uttara Sector 6 so that a flat working with very few metals does not look like it changed its mind between rooms. One piece of wall art in a five element room has to be the right diameter, which is worth a full size template held against the wall before anything is fixed.
A Wardrobe to the Slab Rather Than to Head Height
Tall white panelled doors close the wardrobe run to the ceiling with no gap above. Stopping a wardrobe short is cheaper and it is what most fitted work in this city does, and what it delivers is a permanent shelf of dust and suitcases at eye level. Running to the slab costs more board and one awkward fit against a ceiling that is not level. It also buys a top compartment for luggage and quilts, which is storage this room would otherwise have pushed into a corner. Full height runs are now standard on everything we take through our interior design service in Uttara, and the reason is that ledge rather than the extra capacity. Panelled fronts instead of flat ones make a whole wall of storage read as wall rather than as furniture.
A Floating Ledge Instead of a Dressing Table
The dressing station is a white ledge cantilevered off the wall with a framed mirror above it and a stool that slides fully underneath. A conventional dressing table brings four legs and a footprint with it. The ledge brings neither, the floor stays visible beneath it, and in a room of this width visible floor is the cheapest space available. The trade is that everything has to be bracketed properly, since there is no leg taking the load, and the fixings had to go into solid blockwork rather than into plaster.
Open Display for Handbags Instead of a Closed Shelf
A lit vertical column is built into the wardrobe run and given over to handbags. Bags behave badly in closed storage, losing their shape when stacked and dropping out of use when they are out of sight. A lit column answers both and turns a storage problem into the second decorative element the room owns. Backlit niche shelving beside the dressing ledge does the same for daily items, so the ledge surface itself stays empty. The usual move in bedroom interior design in Dhaka is to add an object to fill a wall. Here the storage was made to be the object.
Everything This Room Deliberately Leaves Out
What the room gives up is worth stating plainly. There is no television point, so an evening film happens in the living room. There is no desk, so work happens elsewhere. There is no reading chair, because a chair would have wanted 700 mm of floor that the wardrobe swing has already claimed. A brief this short only works when the rest of the flat absorbs what it declines.
The exchange underneath all of it is fewer elements, each built better. Four things done properly instead of eight done adequately. That is a hard case to make on a quotation, where a short list of items looks like less value, and clients are right to ask what they are paying for. The answer is board thickness, spray quality, the fit against an out of true ceiling and the fact that nothing in here is a bought item pretending to be joinery. It suits a household that already has one busy room and wants one that is not, and the 1,600 sq ft Uttara Sector 6 apartment project makes the comparison easy, since this flat holds a stripped back bedroom and a heavily detailed one within thirty feet of each other.
Would you rather have four things built properly than eight built to a budget? Call us at 01633-033033 or book a free consultation today.
