9 Inventive Ways to Work a Daybed Swing into Your Interior Design
We’ve posted in past blogs about some of the prime benefits of owning and using a daybed swing. You just might be able to relax much more deeply in one, it’ll give you a private little corner of your own to get away from things, and believe it or not, there’s even a chance that a porch swing or a hanging swing bed might be able to help you sleep better.
You still need to work one of these swing beds into the design of your home, though, and a daybed swing is a big, loud fixture that you won’t be able to soften away with other aspects of design. You can’t cover it up, so you’re going to need to announce it!
Here are some of the best trends in interior design and how you can work a swing bed or a patio bed into these settings.
French Country Decor & Daybed Swings: Perfect Together
One might say that French Country decor is inspired directly by homes in the French Countryside, but honestly, how many homeowners that follow those trends have been to the French Countryside? Realistically, it’s just a popular design scheme that’s taken hold in America and makes artfully use of light colors, elegant fabrics, gilding, mirrors, and candles.
That’s not meant as a slight in any manner whatsoever. The French Country aesthetic is one that deserves every ounce of praise a critic can offer it. You’ll come across plenty of wood and other natural materials in French Country design, often making use of lightly colored fabrics and tapestries. Finishes are either whitewashed or distressed, but there is still a measure of elegance in the overall trend.
Believe it or not, a daybed swing, when carefully chosen and finished, can be worked right into a niche in French Country design with a minimum of effort. Our bed swings are available in a wide range of colors and styles, some of them in bare, reclaimed wood.
Choose a light, washed color and get artistic with the trappings. Choose frilly, fringed pillows and elaborate quilts to make the bedspread and allow some of the native wood underneath to shine right through. The bedswing will take care of the rest, and will put on a markedly contemporary edge to your French Country interior design.
Cool Off with Coastal Chic Decor
Coastal Chic decor is also an immensely popular trend at the present time and is typified by pastels and light colors, like washed-out aqua green and sky blue. That said, it’s not uncommon to see light pinks, yellows, and oranges in coastal decor, although the cool and warm schools never mix. You have to go with one or the other!
Coastal decor, as a school of design, is also typified by a wide-open concept and, usually, a lot of outdoor living or at least window space. The interiors are open and bright, and whatever ornaments are present often have a decidedly maritime influence. Likenesses of palm trees and marine fauna, like mollusks, sea birds, and dolphins, are common throughout. Sand, driftwood, and hemp are also common.
This is one of the reasons that any of our bedswings would be a natural knockout in a design that makes the most of the coastal living trend in design. Any exposed wood (if it’s light, like driftwood) and the exposed cordage used to hang the bed swings would fit right in.
All you need to do is go with the right color for the paint, pillows, and sheets. You can’t really go wrong with white or a washed-out blue, but if there’s a lot of sea green or conch pink in your setting, why not have at it? You’ll have a one-of-a-kind coastal living setting, and one of the few with a bed swing!
Shabby Chic and Bohemian Design
Shabby chic is, in some ways, a welcome relief from the consumptive nature of modern materialism. Both shabby chic and bohemian design cherish a look that says that someone lives there, making a house into a home.
Shabby chic, particularly, embraces antique, used styles and items that appear to have had a long history. Bohemian style makes use of whatever is available, giving it a somewhat eclectic feel. In fact, the original bohemian design might rightly be described as eclectic; nowadays, it has come to adopt connotations of avant-garde, artistic sentiment.
Nonetheless, if you love the look of a home that draws inspiration and a smattering of appeal from more than one walk of design, and only loosely unites them, then you might be a fan of both shabby chic and bohemian design without even realizing it.
By its very nature, a bed swing can be worked into a bohemian or shabby chic design. Just go with one of our products like our R&R bed swing and you’ll have the look built right in. Of course, as usual, the other furniture you pair with it will go a long way. Admittedly, a pile of lush pillows makes more of a bohemian mark than a swing bed, but when you make do with what you have, that’s bohemian too.
Industrial Chic and Modern Interior: Stark, Bare, and Mold Breaking
Industrial chic is brutal. It prizes hard, harsh angles and the bare artifices of architecture. Where many designs smooth over the bones of human engineering, the industrial design aesthetic welcomes them. Industrial design craves sharp corners, exposed brick, bare wooden supports, and wrought iron. Pipes, chains, and I-beams abound, but ironically, for their artistic import, and not for their value as tools of construction.
Nonetheless, industrial-chic is an avenue for you to make the bare, plain aspects of your home’s skeleton into a form of art. Exposed rafters, electrical conduits, bare plumbing, and other inseparable elements of your home’s construction can be made into attractive, industrial-chic accent marks.
You can accomplish the same thing with the inclusion of a daybed swing into a setting. The hanging bed works perfectly as long as you don’t doll it up too much. Honestly, if you can expose the beams from which you hand the bed, even better, and you might even be able to score extra points by suspending the bed from cables, chains, or steel pipes - but don’t do this without consulting an architect or a contractor. Our bed swings come with ropes for a reason, and they’re meant to be hung by them.
You’ve Heard of Minimalism. Get Ready for Maximalism.
Minimalism is a really popular trend in interior design right now. You set up a beautiful room with fixings, trappings, and decor and then strip it away. What you’re left with is minimalism. There are no bells or whistles, and the overall design says more through what is not there than through what is there.
But it’s time to get ready for maximalism. Maximalism is effectively the opposite of minimalism, and an attempt to infuse a space with as much personality as humanly possible. It extends beyond florid, ornate decorations, encouraging the owner to fill the space with personal curios, items of interest, artwork, and personal belongings as possible without engendering a sense of clutter.
In other words, maximalism brings the personality back into a space where minimalism attempts to remove it. In a maximalist setting, you can add bright, deep colors; it’s actually encouraged. Go wild with the carpet and the curtains, and add your photographs and wall artwork to all the open spaces you can without creating a movement imbalance.
A hanging bed is perfect for a maximal setting because the hanging bed itself bespeaks personality, but you’ll want to take it a step further. Make sure the daybed swing itself, and the sheets and pillows, all match
Rustic and Farmhouse Chic Are Here to Stay
Rustic design, similar to farmhouse chic, is very much like French Country design if you take away all of the bells and whistles. Ornate fittings and fixtures are common in French Country living, as are gilding, ornately graven wood fixtures, and (what might be perceived as) expensive fabrics and upholstery.
These are absent in rustic decor, giving way instead to bare, weather wood that has never been finished, simply brickwork, and the touch of rustic metallurgy. Rustic implements and tools abound in rustic decor, and it’s not uncommon to see roughly hewn wood and natural colors dominating.
There’s not much brightness in rustic living, and there is a great emphasis on what is natural and has been proven, as opposed to what has yet to be proven. In rustic design, antique pieces of handmade furniture are more prized than up-and-coming modern designs. In fact, modern elements are expressly shunned.
This can present a challenge if you want to work a bed swing into your home’s rustic decorations, but it’s not impossible. You just need to soften the modern appeal of the bed swing and let the natural character shine through.
Avoid brightly colored trappings, sheets, and pillows. Simplicity reigns in rustic decor. Opt for a neutral finish for the wood or let the native wood shine, and don’t do anything to obscure the manila rope you use to hang the swing!
Contemporary Design Is Simply and Effective
Contemporary is actually one of those design trends that will make it surprisingly easy to work a bed swing into the mix. Contemporary is akin to minimalism and welcomes aspects that have no place elsewhere. If it has a modern feel, it can probably find a home somewhere in the halls of a contemporary design.
A bed swing is ideal for this since it has little place in a traditional setting. In fact, you can just take one of our bed swings and hang it in a contemporary setting and it will do just fine. All the legwork is done for you; just the fact that bed swings are uncommon in design and still offer some “wow” factor means they should be right at home in your modern design.
No Holds Barred with Eclectic Aesthetics!
Eclectic aesthetics are sort of like modern design, but they’re different in at least one very significant aspect. Eclectic design allows elements to vibe in ways that contemporary doesn’t quite. To be clear: you can mix two or three of the design aesthetics mentioned here and you would end up with an eclectic mix, even though there would be no other way to neatly describe what you’d created. In other words, if it has no other place, eclectic might be the way to go.
A bed swing needs little alteration or personalization, if any, to be right at home in a setting that makes artful use of the “eclectic” spirit. In fact, you could do half the room in industrial chic and half the room in rustic - two elements that do not go well together, throw a bed swing in the mix, and the result would be definitively eclectic.
Go Modern with a Daybed Swing
To be clear, the “modern” in modern design does not mean the same thing as the word “modern” which means “at the current time.” Modern design is, at this point, actually quite dated, and refers to a period from the early to mid-1900s. Modern design, today, makes use of an interesting mix of minimalist style and overblown details, the incongruity of which makes it possible to work a bed swing into the setting.
Characterized by thin, exposed lines and flamboyantly filling shapes and upholstery, modern design can welcome a hanging daybed in, since a bedswing is the perfect mix of harsh lines and fluid design. Don’t overstate the colors, and you’ll have a nice match. Grab a good book and relish the finished effect!
The bed swings we produce here at Four Oak Bed Swings are ideal for indoor and outdoor settings, and are compatible with weather-resistant accessories, making our patio swings ideal for rounding out the catalog of outdoor furniture on your back or front porch.
Ideal for outdoor spaces, our wooden swings are made with high quality Southern Yellow Cedar and then finished with at least three coats of heavy duty outdoor varnish. They’re the epitome of quality, ship assembled, and ship for free! Contact us today at 334-202-2870 or at david@fouroakdesigns.com to learn more about our indoor and outdoor daybeds and how they can complete the setting you are trying to create.