Bedroom Sets Style Guide

Modern, traditional, transitional, and country style bedrooms

The bedroom is the place where style gets personal. The bedroom set style you choose should say something about you: your individual aesthetic sense, the design era you love, the modernity or traditionalism that you embrace. To help you bring your unique tastes to the fore, we’ve compiled a list of the styles and bed types used in bedroom sets.

Bedroom set styles

Contemporary/modern

What catches the eye about contemporary or modern bedroom sets is how clean, cool, and sophisticated they look. Low profile beds, simple prints and warm colors, and uncomplicated bedroom furniture pieces with smooth and streamlined forms are all elements of a contemporary bedroom set.

Traditional

At the other end of the spectrum are traditional bedroom sets. Traditional bedroom furniture sets are typically ornate, lavish, and decadent. Woodworking and craftsmanship are put on full display via scrollwork, carved bedposts, and oversized decorative headboards, all manufactured with deep and rich wood tones.

Transitional

Transitional bedroom sets are for eclectic designers, those who appreciate the very best wherever it can be found. Transitional bedroom furniture sets occupy the middle ground between formal and modern, contemporary and classic. Traditional grandeur remains an element of transitional style, only it’s paired with more modest forms and simple, contemporary sophistication. Transitional is probably the most popular bedroom set style.

Country

Push a country bedroom furniture set just a little further stylistically and it would become a rustic bedroom set or a Shaker bedroom set — even a cottage bedroom set. Country bedroom sets feature qualities of many different styles: a rustic charm, a Shaker emphasis on craft and quality, and a cottage love of comfort and rural domesticity.

Matching bed styles with bedroom sets

Platform

Low and undemonstrative with a minimal profile and frequently sans headboard, the platform bed raises utility to the level of art. The simple lines and lack of ornamentation make platform beds a perfect match for contemporary and modern bedroom sets.

Poster/Canopy

A poster bed clamors for attention, which means it fits right in with traditional style bedroom sets. But posters can also be used for country bedroom sets and sometimes even transitional bedroom sets. The dramatically ostentatious canopy bed will treat a traditional bedroom like a theatrical stage.

Sleigh

The high, scrolling footboards that typify sleigh beds look most appropriate with country bedroom sets or traditional bedroom sets. And in rare cases, particularly metal beds with open-slatted footboards, sleigh beds can just pull off the look required for modern bedroom furniture sets.

Slat

Slat isn’t so much a style as a decorative feature, but it’s common enough to merit mention. The open head and footboards of slat beds look appealing in modern and transitional bedrooms, but they also work well with the high wooden footboards common in country bedroom sets.

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