Room by Room
The best guest room ideas start from a question most people skip: what is the room for the fifty weeks a year nobody is sleeping in it? Ours is a reading room with a daybed, which means it earns its keep every evening and still sleeps a guest eight nights a year, and the way to get there was a comfortable chair, a swing-arm sconce, a pendant on a dimmer, and about $520. When our youngest left for college the guest room had everything a guest room needs and nothing a person wants to be in: a bed with a brass headboard, a nightstand, a dresser, a ceiling light, beige walls. Functional, forgettable, and I'd walked past it for two years without thinking of it as a room that could become something. One rainy Tuesday I went in and started moving furniture, and I wasn't prepared for how good it felt. This post is how to make a guest room a room you use, the lighting that does most of it, the daybed versus bed decision, the chair and where it goes, what a guest needs on the night they arrive, the closet and the drawer, the small-room and no-window versions, what it cost, and the ten things I'd tell anyone with a spare room they only enter to vacuum.
A guest room designed only for guests is a hotel room you own: a bed, a lamp, a chair nobody sits in. Design it for yourself first, as a reading room, a sewing room, a music room, an office with a bed in it, and make the guest function fold in. Ours is a reading retreat, and the chair is the point of the room; the bed is a daybed that reads as a deep sofa when made up. My sister's is a studio with a wall bed. A friend's is a library with a trundle. The guest function costs a good mattress, a clean set of linen and a drawer, and none of that stops the room from being yours the other fifty weeks.
The ceiling fixture went first, replaced with a simple pendant on a dimmer with a natural linen shade that throws soft ambient light without dominating, hung with its bottom at 80 inches so nobody making the bed meets it. Then a wall sconce beside the reading chair, swing-arm, at 62 inches, aimed to come over the left shoulder while sitting, on its own switch on the fixture. Then a rechargeable sconce beside the daybed at 60 inches with a touch dimmer, for the guest, so there's a light within reach of the pillow with no cord and no explaining. Three sources, three heights, 2700K everywhere, and the room stopped being beige the same afternoon. The bedroom layering post is the long version of why three sources beat one.
A wide linen-covered armchair with slightly splayed legs from an antique shop downtown, $260, that looks like it belongs in a country house library. It sits in the corner at an angle, back to the wall, window to the right, sconce to the left, with a small round stool for my feet and a side table barely big enough for a cup and a book. A wool blanket folded over the arm. That's where the reading happens three or four evenings a week, sometimes for twenty minutes and sometimes for hours, and it's the reason I go into the room at all. The chair should be the most comfortable seat in the house, because it's the one you'll use, and a guest who finds it will thank you more than for the bed.
A daybed with a good twin or twin XL mattress, made up with linen and four pillows against the wall, looks like a deep sofa by day and sleeps one adult well; it's what we kept, with the brass headboard gone and the bed pushed to the wall. A queen bed sleeps two and eats the room; if guests come in pairs, keep the bed and shrink everything else. A sofa bed is the compromise everyone regrets by morning, unless it's a good one with a real mattress, which starts at about $1,200. A trundle under a daybed sleeps two in a pinch and stores flat. For a room that's yours most of the year, the daybed wins: it's a place to lie and read, a place a guest sleeps, and it doesn't look like a bedroom when the door is open.
A light they can reach from the pillow without hunting for a switch, which the rechargeable sconce solves. A glass and a carafe of water. Two pillows, one firm and one soft. A blanket at the foot for the ones who run cold. An empty drawer and six hangers and a hook on the back of the door. The wifi password on a card in the drawer. A place to put a suitcase that isn't the bed or the floor, a bench or a folding rack. A mirror. A small lamp on a timer so the room is lit when they come up. And nothing personal of yours on the surfaces, because a guest doesn't want to move your things. It's a short list, and most guest rooms fail on the light and the drawer.
Linen on the daybed for the same reason as the bedroom: it looks better rumpled than pressed, which matters in a room where the bed doubles as a sofa. A white or oatmeal duvet cover, a plain wool blanket, four pillows in linen cases against the wall by day, two of them sleeping pillows. The "natural" linen set that went pink in our bedroom under the dimmed chandelier lives here, where the pendant is a different light and it looks fine. Keep a second set of sheets in the drawer so the bed can be changed between a guest leaving and another arriving without the laundry deciding.
The beige walls stayed beige, and under the warm pendant they read as putty rather than rental. One large print over the daybed, a flat-weave wool rug that runs under the daybed and the chair, and linen curtains with a blackout liner, because a guest sleeping in an east-facing room should get to choose when morning starts. A guest room is the one room where the blackout is not optional. The dresser went to the garage; the nightstand became the side table by the chair; the room has the daybed, the chair, the stool, the table and a bench for suitcases, and nothing else on the floor.
In a room under 10 by 10, the daybed goes against the long wall, the chair in the corner at its foot, and the bench folds; everything mounts on the wall, sconces instead of lamps, hooks instead of a dresser, a shelf instead of a nightstand. In a room with no window, a basement or an interior room, the lighting has to do the whole job: a pendant on a dimmer for the day, a sconce at the bed and the chair, and a lamp on a timer that comes on at dusk so the room isn't a cave when the door opens, all at 2700K and with a warm-dimming bulb in the pendant. A large mirror opposite the door doubles the light. My son's first apartment had a windowless "second bedroom," and two plug-in sconces and a mirror made it a room someone would sleep in.
If the room is an office most of the year, a wall bed or a daybed keeps the desk, and the desk gets cleared to a lamp and a blotter when a guest comes; the desk lamp is 3000K and the bedside sconce is 2700K, and both are on their own switches. If it's a studio, the materials live in closed storage so a guest isn't sleeping among your work. If it might be a nursery in a few years, the daybed and the chair both survive that, and the pendant on a dimmer becomes the nursery light. The lighting is the part that carries across every version: a dimmed ceiling light, a sconce at the bed, a sconce or lamp at the chair.
Half the guest room closet is mine, with the off-season coats, and half is empty with six wooden hangers and a shelf, and the line between them is a basket so a guest knows which half is theirs. One dresser drawer is empty and has the wifi card, a spare phone charger and a sewing kit in it. The door has a hook on the back for a robe, and a small mirror on the wall beside it. None of this is decorating, and all of it is what a guest remembers. The rest of the closet is the linen closet for this room: the second set of sheets, the spare blanket, the pillows that aren't on the daybed. A guest room that stores your things in view isn't a guest room; a guest room that stores them behind a door is.
The daybed gets made every morning, because a made daybed is a sofa and an unmade one is a bed in a room you don't use. The chair stays clear. The suitcase bench folds flat against the wall. Once a month the drawer gets checked and the water carafe washed, whether or not anyone is coming, because the room is ready in a way that makes a last-minute guest easy rather than a scramble. The reading nook rule applies here too: a room stays used if it stays empty of everything but its purpose, and the purpose of this one is a chair and a book.
The pendant and dimmer, $140. The swing-arm sconce, $95. The rechargeable sconce, $60. The chair, $260 secondhand. The stool and side table, $70 at the same shop. The rug, $180. The curtains and blackout liner, $160. The bench for suitcases, $45. Bedding, already owned. About $1,000 for the whole room, and $520 for the version that made it mine: the chair, the two sconces and the stool. The pendant was the guest's, the chair was mine, and the room is both.
2700K in every fixture, and the pendant's bulb a warm-dimming one so it goes amber at 20 percent. The rechargeable sconce at the daybed has its own dimmer and lasts about three weeks between charges at guest usage, and I charge it the day before anyone arrives. The dresser lamp's timer is set for dusk to eleven, so a guest coming up after dinner finds a lit room and never has to feel along a wall. It's $12 of timer and it's the thing guests mention.
Make it yours first and a guest's second. A daybed instead of a bed if guests are rare. The best chair in the house. Three lights on three switches, one of them cordless at the pillow. Blackout behind linen. An empty drawer, six hangers, a hook. A bench for the suitcase. Water, a card with the wifi, a lamp on a timer. Nothing personal on the surfaces. And go into the room on an ordinary Tuesday and sit down, because a guest room you use is a room, and one you don't is storage with a bed in it.
Empty nesting gave me this room, and I don't take it for granted. Three or four evenings a week I sit in the chair with the sconce on low and the mountain fog visible through the window, and read until the pendant timer clicks off at eleven. Guests come eight nights a year and sleep well and say the chair is the best seat in the house, which it is. The room had been forgettable for two years because it was waiting for someone else. It stopped being forgettable the afternoon I decided it was mine.
Shop this post: wall sconces and rechargeable wall sconces for the guest's side of the bed