Once the dumping ground for the ironing board and that netball trophy you just can’t bring yourself to chuck out, the spare bedroom has taken the decor baton from the downstairs loo. It’s the ultimate setting in which to peacock your design nous, as the once sorry rooms being turned into lavishly layered havens around the country attest.
“People are enjoying entertaining and are wanting to create a luxurious experience for their guests,” says Mary Graham, co-founder of the London interior design studio Salvesen Graham. “And while they generally want their principal bedroom to be a calming retreat, the guest room is the perfect place to indulge all their decorating fantasies.”
The guest room in the west London home of Lucy Hammond Giles, associate director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, features a mix of antique and contemporary textiles and a jaunty gallery wall
SARAH HOGAN
Of the guest room in her 17th-century cottage in Surrey, the artist Rachel Bottomley
